Choosing Your Domain Names
Yes, that’s domain names, plural. You want the domain name for your business, of course, www.yourcompanyname.com, and one or more names to drive visitors to your main site.
You really want the .com if you can get it. It is the de-facto standard, it is what people expect and will naturally type in from habit. This will probably be a bigger problem for sole proprietorships and other smaller businesses. If you are Joes Diner, I will bet dollars to donuts that someone already has joesdiner.com, joesdiner.net and joesdiner.biz. (I just checked, and they are indeed all taken :-p )You may have to get a little more creative, maybe add your city or state name to the URL: joesdinerkent.com or joesdinerohio.com.
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, of Web Marketing Today suggests four important points in mind as you choose your main domain name:
- Short
- Easy to remember
- Related to your business name or core business
- hard to misspell
SHORT: This helps with so many things, savvy business are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for good, short names. This especially helps with points 2 and 4.
EASY TO REMEMBER: Especially for a local business, people still tell their friends and associates about websites. You want them to be able to say “go to JoesDiner.com” and not “Joes SomethingOrOther, Google it and you should find it.” They’re likely to find your competitor instead.
RELATED TO YOUR BUSINESS NAME, OR CORE BUSINESS: This should be a no-brainer, but over and again we see names like AzureSkies.com for auto detailing businesses.
HARD TO MISSPELL: A lot of people are really poor spellers; even more are extremely poor typists. Put the two together and it’s a wonder anyone finds anything on the Internet.
Now you have your main business site up. That’s great, but it won’t find you many new customers. Maybe a few people will search for “diner in Kent” or “diner in Ohio,” but there likely won’t be many. You need a site optimized for the words people are searching for. How do you know what words people are using to search for the goods and services you provide? There are a lot of commercial tools available, but they all pretty much rely on Google’s keyword tools http://www.google.com/sktool/ and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and http://www.google.com/insights/search/#. These tools will tell you the actual words people are using to search. You want to choose the keyword phrases that get good traffic, with acceptable competition, so that you can rank well for these terms in organic search.
Choose one of these keyphrases and try to get a domain for it. “keyphrase.com” is best; get .net or .org if it is taken. If they are also taken, try a hyphen or two in the phrase, then a suffix if you need to.
So in order of preference you want:
keyphrase.com
keyphrase.net
keyphrase.org
key-phrase.com
key-phrase.net
key-phrase.org
keyphraseblog.com, keyphraseinfo.com, keyphrase1.com, etc. (don’t even bother with .net or .org if you have to go this deep.)
You use this site to build out a nice informational blog about your product or service that attracts buyers and sends them to your main site.
You may ask “That seems like extra work and complexity. Can’t I just put up a page on my site targeted to those phrases?”
Yes, you could optimize pages on your main site for the keywords, but a domain to that keyword always has the potential to be optimized better, and as soon as one of your competitors does this, he will eat your lunch.
Loading...