just a thought...
Whatever the acronym may be, consideration of domain name availability will be a factor. e.g. Google gives high priority to search returns when the searched term(s) is included in the domain name itself.
I would encourage private discussions (although not sure how to go about it) as some groups who should be ASHamed of themselves may be quick to disrupt planning and execution of these ideas.
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True, but there are more ways around cybersquatters than worrying about them snagging a name. There are 36 algorithms that Google uses to rank a site (meta tags are ignored) At random, the engine grabs 12-18 of those to calculate rankings. "Is the keyword in the domain name?" is certainly one of the top ones, but there are other factors playing in our favor.
It's a good idea, but pretty much all 3-5 letter acronyms are long gone anyway. What ASH can NOT override, will be having tens of thousands of user's personal and business web sites all with a link back to our organization. Add blog entries and sig files and you meet Googles biggest algorithm which is "how many sites link back to this domain?"
I tell my clients to think of it as the "High School Cool" scenario. Who was the coolest kid in school? The one everyone
thought was the coolest kid in school. Every time a site (on a different IP) has a link back to our group, it counts as a "vote" for our site in Google's rankings.
It may sound like I'm giving away trade secrets, but it's only one of the ways we will get high placement and something that ASH can do nothing about. If we choose ATA (for example) and ASH (or anyone else) buys up 5,000 domains, we simply register ATAgroup.org or something else and brand that. The ECA is
www.ecassoc.org, an awkward domain name at best - but shows up well in a search. By posting the link in this thread, I just cast another "vote" their way as far as SEO is concerned.
There's no silver bullet, just a lot of individual methods that all work in concert to get a site high in the search engines.
Case in point: many companies have a web operations department. Google web operations and tell me what you see...