Why companies with names starting with an A makes more money

Background - Why we even started thinking like this

It all started in online text games called MUDs (multi user dungeon) where we used to cheat. This might seem far from online or offline business of today, why would I need to tell you about text games from the 80s? The thing is that there are actually a lot of similarities.

We had coded a bot (a little program that played the game fully automatic) that ran around with the character and killed monsters so that it gained experience and levels. This worked extremely well on our test computer and when we finally decided to increase the testing on a few other computers we discovered that something was wrong. Somewhere in the process it worked worse on the other computers. Not that it didn't work or stopped it just didn't do as much xp as on the test rig. Say that the test rig would do 20.000 experience points per hour then the other computers could only manage 5.000. For a long while we thought about bad setup and differences in internet speed and reasonable stuff like that.

After 2 weeks of testing it finally struck us that there was another difference as well, we used different characters on the different computers. The characters were setup identically for testing purposes but the server required unique names for all characters, this was the only difference. The first character on the test server was named Assar and the second one on the other computer was named Heights.

After a little searching through the code we found the bug. After the character had killed the monster he started looking for a new one. And if the nearest one was something that started with A, he would try to "attack a". Due to the command auto-completion function this would work as Attack Antelop or Attack Aardwark depending on what was closest. Assar would in this case attack himself. This was a good thing because in most areas in the game the monsters were named "a zebra" or "an orange whale". Attacking everything that started on A would make the second character Heights go haywire while Assar tried to "attack Assar" which would only return an error code and he would return to his starting position while Heights got stuck in bad areas forever or until he got killed.

What on earth does this have to do with business?

The thing with this is to understand that the name of something isn't unimportant, we will handle the information we have of something based on the name and especially internet services will. If you would have a name on your company that automaticly got benefits in search engines or niche directories, wouldn't it be a good thing?

Why the letter A?

This is so simple you will never believe it. To explain it we need to know something about search engines that will cast a little light on the topic. In search results about 43% click on the first link. Hardly anyone goes to page 2 on Google and noone goes to page 50 to find what they want. This isn't only true for engines such as google it works everywhere, we are to lazy to do any serious research when we want to find a product or a service, on or off line.

When you look in the yellow pages for cars, in what order are the listings listed? Alphabeticly, this so that it will be easy to find the company you are looking for. But if you are not looking for a certain company but for cars in general, you will choose something from the first page you found, just as you would on Google. On the first page of the cars section there are only companies starting with the letter A, that is the nature of  alphabetical sorting. Lots and lots of directories and catalogues use this kind of sorting, even this one where this article is listed. Maybe not as only choice but as a choice.

Google goes through this directory once or twice a day and when it does so it clicks on all the links and reads the content, content close to the top of a page is considered the most important and pages close to the frontpage (in clicks) is considered more important. If you happen to have a link in this directory starting with an A, you'll get a better listing in Googles eyes and therefore getting a little better results of your SEO work. This works on bigger siter too, Eniro.com and Hitta.se are the biggest yellow pages on the net in Scandinavia and both sort companies Alphabetical. Hitta.se will even limit their result to the first 4 results, making it impossible for the B:s and C:s to get any traffic at all. Google, Yahoo and Live Search all traverse these massive sites a lot and the same thing goes for them as for this site, if you get a result near the front page on one of them, you'll get better results in Google.

So what do I do?

There is only one resonable thing to do, run off and rename your company, I already have.