Articles

The Importance of Your Domain Name

Posted 4/01/2008

By: Gil Lozano Valencia,

Global One Marketing

Your website is built around the Domain Name. Most likely, you will print the Domain Name on your business cards, promotional materials, brochures, catalogues, manuals, page title and you may even incorporate the Domain Name into your logo. A Domain Name is much more than this. Your website name or Domain Name will be the way in which people find your site, the way they will refer to it and they will use to remember you.

Think about this for a moment. If you want to buy a book on the web, most likely you will not type the name of the book and search for it; instead, you will go directly to www.amazon.com or www.barnersandnoble.com. Whatever the name of your web site; remember that the Domain Name will play a vital role in your web site’s popularity, search engine relevance and page ranking.

The most popular and ideal Domain Name extension is .COM, however it is not always possible to get a good .COM Domain Name relating to your business.

What are the alternatives? .NET is also a popular Domain Name extension but it works best for associations such as www.realestate.net or technology companies such as www.networksolutions.net. If you are able to register a good, short, catchy .NET Domain Name it is almost as good as a .COM. the idea is to avoid long, complex, hard-to-remember Domain Names. Less desirable options are the newer extensions such as .INFO, .TV, .US but again if you find a Domain Name that feels good and is short then get it. This should be your last resort alternative.

With the international liberalization of the Internet you may also be able to register in country .COM domains such as .COM.UK, .COM.AR (Argentina) this is a viable option if your marketing and promotion strategy is targeting that particular audience. (This will be the subject of a future article).

Easy To Spell.

We have heard many radio commercials where they have to stop and spell the web site name followed by the 10 digit toll free number. If you have to spell your web site's name out to people, you need to think of alternatives. If you want people to remember you, they must be able to remember your site as a word because words are easy to remember.

Double letters. Be careful about double letters. Take for example http://www.caRRental.com . This Domain Name uses a double R this causes doubt. The double letters look a strange if written without capitalization, www.carrental.com and a good Domain Name should not force the user to assume anything about the name. If you have no choice and must use a Domain with double letters, then registers both versions of the Domain Name and forward the least common to the other domain.

Avoid misspelled or unnatural spellings unless you are using misspelled words with specific traffic generation and SEO objectives.

Avoid dashes in your domain name. Using dashes is a great way of finding a better name that hasn't been registered, but can also make your domain more difficult to remember. If you cannot find the name you want without a dash then limit to a maximum of one dash.

Descriptive Name

A good site name should describe exactly what the site is about. Take the 'real world' example of one of my clients: MEB Corporation, before my time as their marketing consultant they registered the web site www.mebcorporation.com. From the name you would never know what the web site was about or the type of product and service the company provided. MEB is a major importer of premium wines and wine barrels from Argentina under the label of VillaMagna. Recently we relauched their web site under the Domain Names of www.villamagnawine.com and the Spanish name of www.vinosvillamagna.com. Now, when someone types the Domain Name they will have no doubt of the purpose and business of the web site. Remember corporate names, partner or owner’s name do not make good Domain Names.

KeyWords

Your Domain Name is highly important in terms of search engine relevance. If you are in the wine distribution business then you need to incorporate the word “wine” into your domain name. If your business is to sell web page templates then you need to incorporate the word “templates” into the Domain Name (http://oscommercetemplates.com).

You now have the basic essentials to register a good Domain Name but your chances of registering the name you want with a .COM extension are very low. Here is when you need to become very creative and start compiling combinations of words that a relevant to your business or service. Let’s assume you are in the business of importing and distributing wines from Argentina then you build highly relevant keywords which you convert into successful Domain Names: Start with your initial 3 key words:

wine, distribution, argentina, importer

Add the synonyms of distribution, possible variations of distribution and pluralization of certain words now we have the following keywords:

Wine, distribution, distributor, distributors,

argentina, argentinian, wholesaler, sales

There many more possible variation but with the five words above we can build as many as 64 possible Domain Name combinations all related to the wine. Remember, whenever possible, apply pluralization of keywords.

Having a good keyword oriented Domain Name will provide you with high search engine rankings with little effort on your part.

Register Your Domain Name

Once you have registered your Domain Name and depending on the quality of hosting provider

(For more details visit: www.leveltenhosting.com )you will also be able to create sub-domain of your Domain Name. Let’s continue with example of our wine importer and assume that you registered www.argetinanwineimporter.com you will then be able to create sub-domain variations such as: merlot.argetinanwineimporter.com or malbec.argetinanwineimporter.com.

Remember: Successful Domain Names Consist Of:

·         Good Domain Extension

·         Easy To Spell

·         Easy To Remember

·         Descriptive Of Your Business Activity

·         As Short As Possible