We should take a moment to acknowledge a raging dispute between the trademark attorneys and the marketing and search engine community.
The trademark attorneys and the marketing and search engine optimizing communities are at odds. Trademark attorneys encourage businesses to adopt unique, arbitrary and fanciful word marks whereas the marketing and search engine optimizing professionals often encourage businesses to adopt descriptive business names and matching descriptive website URLs to maximize search engine optimization. This is one approach and it’s hard to argue with maximizing search engine results, however, adopting a descriptive company name and URL undermines the business goal of developing a strong and highly valuable trademark because descriptive and generic phrases cannot be registered as trademarks on the Federal Register, and this is where all the best and most valuable trademarks are registered.
For example, if a business owner intends to provide high quality landscaping services, it cannot register the words HIGH QUALITY LANDSCAPING as a trademark on the Principal Register. The law of trademarks is grounded in fair competition and permits all landscapers to use this phrase to describe their landscaping services; the policy is that no single company should be permitted to exclusively own and use the HIGH QUALITY LANDSCAPING.
The goal is to come up an arbitrary or fanciful marks for your company, products and services. Doing so will add the greatest value to your company.
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