Member Avatar for Otir

Hi there,

I am new to the community and not entirely familiar yet to what I contribute or ask when it comes to this forum. So please bear with me, and help me address the issue that I am submitting here:

I am working for a synagogue which is therefore a non-profit organization and have suggested domain names (dot org) for the new entity that has been formed after the merger of two different temples. The decision makers are a board of trustees who have little to no understanding of technology and zero understanding of the web and seo. I am far from being an expert but at least I understand a little bit more than them and I offered the following rationales for the choices I suggested:

The URL should be
- simple to dictate orally
- simple to type even when on a small device
- simple to remember

  • short is better

  • NO hyphen, no underscore, no punctuation marks, no number because these are absolute source of confusion especially when said aloud

  • unequivocal

I will not make you laugh with the kind of suggestions that I was therefore asked to consider but they show me that they still have not understood what I am saying and I am wondering if I should go with their stupid choices because after all they pay me for the job, but I will live with the consequences in the future, so it is for the moment pissing me off that they hire a professional but still want to decide despite her recommendation.

How would you explain that if our name is already shared by many other congregations in the US, we are much better off using a unique combination of acronym for search engine optimization? Am I wrong to think that if for instance there are plenty of "Shir Shalom" that have already a good rank because they are not starting to exist from today, calling "our shir shalom" will still bring the same pages containing the already existing URL before ours would have organically made its way to page 1.

I suspect that they do not want to follow my recommendation because they believe the congregants will not like the URL as if it was the name of the place, and I have explained that it has nothing to do with the actual name and that we are not an online entity so that the recognition of our url is not as critical on a branding point of view. Unfortunately the full name as an acronym is css, which is what they wanted in the first place, so I also had to explain that it actually means Cascading Style Sheet in the IT world and anyways it is taken of course.

If any of you would have intelligent and articulate point to make to help me resolve this dilemna I would be very grateful for your help.

Thanks in advance.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jayashreemarg

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A short, practical summary tailored to : pick a single, memorable domain that clearly disambiguates your congregation from others (for example add a city or “temple” keyword to the name), keep it short and pronounceable, register common variants and forward them, then focus effort on local signals and content rather than expecting the domain name alone to win the SERPs. Exact-match or keyword-heavy domains no longer give a free ranking boost—the algo changes in 2012 removed that advantage for low-quality EMD sites—so quality, local relevance and structured signals matter far more. Search Engine Roundtable / EMD summary.

A couple of technical facts that help the board discussion: hostnames are limited to letters, digits and hyphens by long-standing DNS standards (underscores are problematic and cause issues with certificates and some software), and hyphens are more SEO-friendly than underscores when used as word separators in URLs. See the RFC guidance and compatibility notes and the practical advice about underscores vs dashes. RFC 1123. SSL.com on underscores. Discussion of hyphens vs underscores.

Choose .org for a nonprofit if that supports branding and trust; TLD choice does not confer special ranking power (country-code TLDs do signal country targeting), so use geotargeting and Search Console settings if local reach is important. Then claim and verify a Business Profile and add LocalBusiness structured data, consistent NAP across directories, and well-optimized pages for the community — these signals outweigh a pretty domain. Google Search Central: multi-regional sites. . Structured data docs.

To convince the board (as and advise): present 2–3 vetted domain options with short pros/cons (memorability, email, SEO risk), show local search examples for similar names, and offer a low-cost plan to register variants + 301-redirects and claim the Business Profile. If a later migration is needed, follow Google’s change-of-address and 301 guidance and keep redirects long enough to transfer signals. .

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Member Avatar for canadafred

hey, you really need to think out of the box on this one. The acronym idea is not a good one necessarily from a search engine optimization perspective unless you want to capitalize on the keywords in the acronym. Ideally you'd want two web sites that are completely differently constructed, one keyphrase rich and the other the easy to remember acronym. You can anchor text cross link them fairly extensively for an SEO boost particularly if one was a blog and the other a very user friendly static or flash site, likely the acronym.org . The other thing is about the .org extension, it is much more search engine friendly to have either a .com or a country specific extension, in my case a .ca .

There's a couple of things to consider while you develop a strategy to deal with the board :). I'll get back to this discussion to see where it has gone ... best of luck.

Member Avatar for Otir

Hi Fred,

Thank you so much for guiding me, I appreciate it so much!

So if I follow correctly what you are telling me, from an SEO point of view, better have the same name as other websites already existing that have the dot org, but with the dot us extension?

I do not believe I can have two web sites, although I could always separate some of the entities of the organization, I guess. Most of the website is built on CMS (Joomla!). Very few pages are static.

I hope I know what I am doing (I doubt it, to be completely honest!).

As for the strategy to deal with the board, I would love to learn or not where I can learn: for the past five years, I had slowly managed to deal with the one that has now been absorbed into a completely different one, and I am afraid that I do not have the patience anymore, the more so that they did not see it useful to include a budget for website communication at all... I feel like it could be time for me to look for other jobs..

Thanks for your support!

Member Avatar for jayashreemarg

Try to get a technical person for help in order to explain them the actual fact of the URL selection. This could help you in the process.

Member Avatar for jayashreemarg

Thanks for sharing this link. It has really been useful and informative.

commented: What link? There is no link. Just your pointless comment above... -3
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