Choosing a Domain Name

Choosing a Domain Name

Many web-based businesses fail because they do not have a functional business model. Before you even choose a name for your site you should know your target audience, what you intend to sell to them, and what will make your business idea unique or different than everything else that is already on the market.

You can still make significant profits without being sure what you want to sell if you can solve large problems and make life easier for a group of targeted people. At any level, you still have to know your goals and the reasons why you are creating a site. What makes your site different than the millions of sites already published?

My first few sites failed because they had no functional business models. They added little value to the web. That is not to say that I didn’t learn from them, because I did, but they led me to creating this one. If you are uncertain of yourself, don’t be afraid to create multiple channels just to try them out. If you know you want to do something for the long run, you may want to spend a bit of time

watching the marketplace before pouring too much effort into making a huge site that is hard to update.

SEOBook.com has done exceptionally well, and it has even revived the value and business models of some of my other sites. The single biggest thing I have going for me is the social currency my blog has created.

Some people think it is incredibly important to have keywords in a domain. People purchase domains like look-4-buy-cheap-discount-viagra-online-pharmacy.com. This is a horrible domain name!

An exact matching domain name in a competitive market can be seen by Google as a signal of quality since acquiring one would either indicate that you were early to the market or paid a premium for the URL. Some strong .com names sell for millions of dollars, while associated .net and .org domains can range from a few hundred dollars to a hundred thousand dollars.

If your site exhibits a number of strong brand related characteristics, such as high search volume for brand related keywords, high clickthrough rate for core brand related searches, many repeat visitors, or relevant matching URL and/or anchor text, there is a good chance that Google will place a set of Sitelinks in the search results for brand related search queries.

Keywords in the domain name may help some (as people tend to link to websites using their official names as the link text), but if I were going to create a long-term business, I would put brand above keyword-rich, unless you can find a name that exactly matched your core keywords or something that allows you to leverage both assets.

If you are creative, you usually can get keywords in the domain while keeping it short, memorable, fairly brandable, and free of hyphens.

Here is an article about the effect of domain names on anchor text (http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/domain-name.htm). Since I originally wrote the article, Google has gotten a lot better at detecting natural

linkage data, so it is important to ensure you mix your inbound link text. Tips on mixing anchor text are located in the link building sections of this e-book.

Direct marketing mail campaigns usually peak in effectiveness around the third exposure to a marketing message. Many shoppers look around. If you want them to come back, you want to have a domain name that will stick in their heads. It can have keywords in it, but the thing you want more than anything else is a name that sticks.

If the option between having the dash in the domain and not having a dash exists, you are probably better off going without the dash as it looks more professional and would most likely be more memorable.

It is branding suicide to only have users find your site via search engines. If you are hoping to make sales on the first view in search engines, you need strong copywriting and usability.

If you are just using quick-buck-lead-generation websites then you may want to use a keyword-rich hyphenated domain for the small benefit it may offer, but in most cases, I do not recommend a hyphenated domain name for long-term websites.

People will forget the words in a domain name that is exceptionally long. Another problem with exceptionally long URLs is that they get cut off in e-mails and some other data transmission types. If you make the idea hard to spread, then you limit your site’s potential income.

What if you could get some of the benefits of a long keyword rich domain while still using a shorter and easy to brand domain name? You can!

If you use a short, branded domain, you can still include your keywords in your page title and logo to help control how some people link at your site. For example, a company like PayPal can register the domain Paypal.com, but put the words payment solutions or online payments in their logo near the word PayPal. Some people will reference them with those words as part of the company name.

Search engines associate words that occur near one another. For example, Google showed the following as suggested advertisements.

On the far right notice how Google realized that my name and the name of my strongest brand are related.

If you can work your name or your company name into the default topical vocabulary of a search, you will have a strong advantage over your competitors.

  

Some regional-based search engines or indexes will only list sites that are registered in their country code. If your site exclusively or primarily caters to a specific country, then you will most likely want to register a domain using the local country code.

Some search engines will still show your site in regional based search results if your site is hosted within that country, has links to and from other local sites, and/or has your address and phone number in the page text, but many directories are extremely picky and will only list regional domains.

As search progresses, localization of results will become more common. Some of the major search engines already give sites a regional ranking boost based upon where the site is hosted and the domain extension.

If you develop a regional domain (.co.uk for example), I also suggest buying the

.com version of your domain, if it is available, and forwarding it to the regional domain you registered. By buying the .com version and forwarding it your site, you help retain traffic you may have lost by people forgetting to put your region specific domain extension in their address bar when they type the website address directly into the address bar.

I prefer to use a .com version of a URL over other generic TLDs. People may assume your site is a .com even if it is .net, .biz, .org, or .info when they go to look for it on the web. If all they remember is your domain name, they may type your domain name followed by ‘.com’ because ‘.com’ is the default TLD in most people’s heads. If you don’t own the .com version as well, you are giving some of your hard-earned traffic to a competitor.

If you are running a charity or organizational website a .org may be seen by some people as a sign of credibility.

It is a good idea to place your business location on your web pages. If you are in a country where the search technology is primitive, local searchers will frequently add the country or city name to their searches, and if you have them on your pages you stand to be returned as a relevant result for more searches.