Recently decided to startup with the web developer I was working with – not the best time to be starting up, but we’re starting now so we’re fully functional by the new year.

Anyway, we’ve had disputes regarding the company name. Admittedly, I’m more of a designer, and am somewhat of a novice in marketing and not an expert on SEO. He is adamant to choose a company name with contains several keywords – something like "web design solutions", or the like.

I think this is awful. It’s not a company name – it’s just a bundling of various generic terms. However, he says it will improve our traffic, and lead to more clients. As I said, I’m not an expert in the field, but I’m not convinced. I’d more prefer a unique "brand".

How important are keywords in a URL or company name? Is it likely to increase traffic enough to make it worthwhile?

I wouldn’t do that for a company of that nature.

Make a memorable brand, then market it.

A URL like that sounds unprofessional and spammy, imo.

That’s my thoughts exactly. When I’m searching for ANYTHING, I generally ignore URLs that are just loads of hyphenated generic keywords.

He’s dumb. That’s a terrible idea. Buy up domains like that and forward to your own domain if you actually think it will improve SEO, but for the love of god don’t make it your company name.

It reeks of shoddy hole-in-the-walls that you see in $0.99-store shopping centers with business names like "Dentist," "Nail Salon," or "Mexican Food."

Come up with a name and market it, better than worrying about keywords in the name, like it has been discussed, sounds spammy

I hope you good luck and hope its better in england than here in America

Another vote here for ignoring the idiot

Reasons have already been posted above.

came to post this. Get a good, brandable domain for the company site but feel free to let him set up a few filter sites with keywords and content that links back to your main company site.

Not sure if "web design" is the business you are starting or you just used that for an example but if so it’s not the type you would get too much business from type-in/search traffic. You would get more from referrals and such.

This as well.

If he wants to use search engines, use PPC advertising. At a firm I worked at a few years ago, we did that and got decent results in the winter months when apparently people around here don’t want marketing/development done.

the other main issue with "web design solutions" is that it is already a high search term. So even if people search for the exact term, you wont even come up for a couple months until you get your SEO rocking for that term.

marketable name, keyword driven content

tell him to stop being such a fucking faggot and not everything in a "science"

If you’re going to use these as your website name they really are 100% relevant and useful. However, you can use these as he suggests (they seem pretty SEO friendly to me) and have your own title as a sort of subtitle or something in your logo…Good luck!

It’s rumored that google will be changing their company name to, "good internet searching site."

ForsakeN bought

good-internet-searching-site.com in anticipation.

This. If your company brand has a keyword in it that’s related to your industry then great, if not forcing it makes it sound spammy.

If he’s really worried about ranking for ___ keyword start a blog on your site and craft your h1 title tags to those keywords and work on getting deep links from high authority websites. Also, make sure you have a decent keyword density in the post with varying anchor text including your keyword or website url but again, too much = spammy looking.

Had a meeting with his this morning and convinced him that this was a bad idea, despite a few protests.

Now it’s up to me to come up with a company name, though

Thanks to everyone for your input.

Was going to post a serious answer until I saw this.

my favorite site on the internet is

having keywords in domain definitely helps