When referring to another site, it really doesn’t make much difference how we do it as long as the people we are communicating with get the meaning of our message and know what site it is that we are talking about. However, are there correct and incorrect ways to refer to someone else’s site? Well, of course there are different terms that can be used as anchor text that the recipient of your link-love may or may not appreciate, but for the purposes of this post, I am going to refer specifically to when you are referring to a site by it’s proper name.

I don’t know if there is any “proper etiquette” when referring to the “official” name of another site, but personally when it comes to referring to another site by something other than a piece of anchor text or the author’s name, I will try and determine how the author would want me to refer to his or her site. If this cannot be determined, then I will either take my best guess or just use the URL as anchor text.

Now, how do I try and determine what the author might want used as anchor text? Well, usually a quick browse to the site will yield the results I am looking for and by looking in just a couple of places I will know not only what the author uses for the name of the site, but also any preferred capitalization or punctuation. Ready for some examples?

Let’s start with the site you’re looking at right now, if you browse to my homepage and look at the title bar (that bar at the very top of the window that also contains your minimize and close buttons) you will see that it says “romandock dot com” and if you look at the page header, it says exactly the same thing. This would lead me to believe that the author would like this site to be referred to as romandock dot com rather than RomanDock, Roman Dock or any of the myriad of other ways I have seen it referred to throughout the blogosphere. In this case, I can vouch for the accuracy of this method.

Moving on to some other examples, going to www.enkayblog.com and checking these same two spots yields “Enkay Blog” not Enkayblog or EnkayBlog. Browsing over to dereksemmler.com we see “Derek Semmler dot com” rather than Derek Semmler Dot Com or derek semmler dot com. Finally, if I go to www.accordingtoandrea.com, I find “According to Andrea” as the site name.

Just for fun, I visited some of the recent readers in the MyBlogLog widget and here is what I found (format below is URL – Site Name – possible mistakes):

relyme.blogspot.com – reLYME – not relyme, Relyme, or Re Lyme
www.leochiang.com – Leo Chiang DOT COM – not LeoChiang dot Com
haiku-poems-blog.blogspot.com – a haiku poem blog – not Haiku Poem Blog or A Kaiku Blog
www.betshopboy.net – Betshopboy (or it might be Betshopboy.net) – not Betshop Boy or Bet Shop Boy or Bet Shopboy

Now, this won’t work in every situation. For example, at www.standoutblogger.com I found the following variations and am therefore not sure what the “correct” or “official” way would be: Stand Out Blogger, standout blogger, StandOutBlogger, and StandOut Blogger. Perhaps Thomas will stop by and let us know the correct way to refer to that site of his. Also, let that be a lesson to all of you to be consistent when referring to your own site so that people don’t get the wrong idea or start calling your site by the wrong name.

Now, all of this doesn’t really matter because just like a rose will smell the same no matter what you call it, a website is going to look the same no matter how someone refers to it or what anchor text they use to link to it. I just thought this might be something interesting to ponder for a few moments on a Tuesday morning.

If you have seen a site be referred to by a misnomer or know of a site who’s name is often misrepresented, feel free to leave a comment below. If you haven’t signed up for my RSS feed yet, be sure to do so!