The Mechanics of a Domain Name

Human beings like to “name” things, babies, horses, homes, places, nations, continents, businesses, learning institutions, vehicles, and now web sites. As far as the internet is concerned a domain name is the core identity of a website.

A domain name for any website is its address and it is by suing the domain name that users find what they are looking for on the World Wide Web. And since websites are in the primary business of attracting surfers it is the selection of a domain name that could make or break your business.

So, here are a few thoughts:

 A domain name that is short and has great recall will be most successful. Unless surfers on the net remember your domain name or bookmark it they are unlikely to return or recommend your website to others.

 Even if you do have an innovative domain name like “ cosmetics.com” you need to consider registering other names like “ sunblock.com; blush.com; lotions.com; perfectcomplexion.com and so on” The purpose is that any potential customer looking for any cosmetics or information on cosmetics must be led to your site irrespective of what they type into a search engine browser.

 And it is important to think beyond.com. consider options like .net, .org, and so on.

 Weigh the pros and cons of using hyphens in a domain name. Hyphens are advantageous with search engines but people tend to forget them.

 Ensure that the domain name you choose does not infringe any trademarks or copyrights.

 Be sure to register your domain name and take all steps to protect your property and rights.

 A domain name is your identity or “company” name on the net. So you must choose wisely if you intend your world wide business to be a success.

 Use keywords that pertain to your business or website in the domain name. And be sure to cover all bases.

 Weigh the pros and cons of choosing a country specific domain over a universal one. A dot com is universal while a dot co.uk is country specific. Here you need to study your business plan carefully and think about future growth potential.

 Cover your basis legally and consider registration and copyright infringement.

When choosing a domain name think: profits, search engine optimization, human recall, and relevance. In the World Wide Web it is traffic that will drive your business and what drives traffic is easy accessibility.

In the cyber world what can make or break a business is a domain name so choose with care and you will be tension free.

Why Pay Extra to Cloak Your Email Address When You Register Your Domain Name?

It is truly unfortunate that the companies in charge of domain names make you pay to cloak your e-mail address so that spammers will not get it and send thousands of spams to you every day. It seems unfortunate that you should have to pay for someone else who is manipulating the domain name registration companies. It would make sense that the domain name registration companies would block out spider bots, which come in and scrape all the e-mail addresses from their entire system.

But since the domain name registration companies do not block out these people or try to skip trace them to catch them because they are spamming people illegally, we all now have to pay extra money to cloak our e-mail address from the domain name registration public lists. Why should we have to pay? There is no reason these companies cannot simply hide the e-mail addresses from the public. That makes no sense at all and they want to charge you a yearly fee. This is criminal in my opinion.

On one hand we have the Federal Trade Commission, which is unable to rid the world of spam and then we have the domain name registration companies refusing to try to limit people trying to get your e-mail address from their databases. It seems to me that this is an identity theft issue and the scraping of e-mail addresses is used in illegal behavior and therefore the Federal Trade Commission should do something about it. There is no reason that people should have to pay to hide their e-mail address.

And to charge people between nine and $18 per year to hide your e-mail address on their domain name registration company’s database is totally outrageous. They just are looking for a way to make more money and socket to the consumer, without taking responsibility for protecting their customer’s identity. It seems truly unfortunate that we have to deal with this and nothing is being done and still the consumer has to pay through the nose. Please consider this in 2006.

Website Traffic And Search Engine Optimization: The Domain Name

Whether for business or personal use, before there can be a website, there must be a domain name, and one of the most important steps of a search engine optimization plan is to pick the right one.

So what IS a domain name? A domain name is that thing that people give you when you ask for their website. TexasToyota.com, for example, is a domain name. (That's a plug, by the way. They really treated me nice when I bought my car from them, so I thought I would pay them back a little. If you don't believe me, look for an article I wrote titled "If Michael Is Selling, I'm Buying".)

Some things to consider in choosing a domain name are:

1. Keep it short and simple. If your website is for your business, a short domain name has its advantages. Whether you want to print it on business cards or display it on a billboard, making the domain too long or too complicated may make it too hard for potential customers to catch in one reading or recall later, if they did not have a chance to write it down. An exception to this is if you can get a phrase which will be remembered into the domain name (Example: buytwogetonefree.com) ...which leads us to point number two.

2. Make it easy to remember. Your customer won't always have a pen with them, or maybe they won't even think about your domain name or website until later. Short, simple, and easy to remember can be important, but you normally shouldn't just opt for something like qdipe.com, and we are about to tell you why.

3. Relate it to your business or organization. If you sell bicycle parts, try to put "bicycle parts" in the domain name. This is not only for the eyes of internet surfers, but for the search engines as well. They use various factors to rank the pages they visit, and sometimes the words used in the domain can increase the rank of the page. This brings up another point.

4. Think about keywords. Although we are not going to get into Meta tags in this article, keywords are important. Even if hardly any search engines look at the "keyword" Meta tag any more, they are still searching the content of your site for keywords found within the text of the body, "alt" tags on the images, and "title" tags on anchor text and other links. Taking number 3 and number 4 together, the best of both worlds is to have a business name that is a keyword or phrase relevant to the business and use that as the domain name.

5. Cute's nice, but...! Some people try to make their domain name memorable by using puns, jokes, wordplay, or number combinations. Just be careful. A few years ago I needed a domain name for a weight loss product. I went through all the "short" and "easy to remember" names I could think of, but they all were taken! I then came up with the domain name NoDiet4Me.com. It made perfect sense to me! I went to have a magnetic sign made for my car, and the lady read it this way..."No die t-4-me?" and shook her head with a confused look on her face! The site worked fine and got a lot of traffic and made me a lot of money, but now I wonder if I lost any traffic because of my domain name.

6. To dash or not to dash. There have been a lot of discussions about whether to put a hyphen in the domain name. I can't honestly answer based on my own experiences, as I use both, but the consensus seems to be from my research that it is easier for a search engine to categorize and rank a site that has a hyphen than one where the words are run together. Example: chickensoup vs. chicken-soup.

There is one danger to be recognized if you choose to use the hyphen. You must make sure it is clearly shown in any printed advertising or representations, and if giving the domain name verbally, go to great lengths to make sure that your listener understands the hyphens MUST be inserted. Many people are not that internet savvy and will hear "bobs dash bicycles" and still type in "bobsbicycles".

7. Alphabet soup. Ever wonder what's best? Should you get a .com or .net? Will it be okay to get a .biz or .us? What the heck do those things mean anyways and does it matter? Well, in today's world, most people entering the internet world are familiar with .com and .net. After that, they tend to get confused. I will not get into country specific top level domains at the moment, as this article is primarily directed at those either doing business in the U.S. or those doing business worldwide with a generic type product where a country-specific domain name would not matter. So, in most cases, .tv, .ws, or .org will not matter one way or another. By the way, .tv is the top level domain for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and .ws is the top level domain for Samoa.

Just to continue this discussion on extensions for a moment. When passing someone your domain name whether verbally or in writing, make sure they see or hear the extension. To use my earlier example, simply saying, "My website is bobsbicycles", will probably cause people just to type in the .com on the end as that is what they are most used to hearing.

8. Branding. In some cases, a domain name may be associated with an easily recognized, or branded, product. Wal-Mart and Ford do not have to worry THAT much about such niceties as keyword density or "easy to remember" names. However, if you are working with a product or company which has or is in the process of branding itself, some of the information given above about selecting domain names might not be relevant.

I am going to assume that most people who read this little article are probably trying to do some SEO (search engine optimization) themselves, and one of the best places to start is with the domain name itself.

How to Pick a Domain

If you are reading this you might be close to setting up your first website ever or you can be a person with experience that is just curious to see if there are things that you might have missed. Whatever the case is I hope to be able to provide you with a few of the things that I personally feel are important when you are picking the right domain name for your new site.

I assume that you have already found the topic that you are going to be focusing on and therefore I will not go into any of the things that relates on how to find a profitable market online. The reason I say this is that I assume that you new site will somehow have a business related theme as a personal website with pictures of your family and stuff doesn’t need much consideration when choosing the domain name.

So let us get into the things that I strongly feel you would have great benefit from.

It is a know fact that more and more traffic (aka visitors to your site) comes from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (which has now launched their new site called Live). So with this fact in mind you will need to find out how to get the best possible placement in the search engines so that people will come visit your site.

Most online marketers agree that from a SEO point of you the right keyword rich domain name can help your site rank better that if you are not using a keyword rich domain name. You might say that site like Nike.com, Amazon.com and Ebay.com doesn’t have keyword rich names and you are absolutely right.

However the difference between you and the great site is that they have much larger advertising budget than you have and therefore they can get away with having names that doesn’t make much sense. So if you are on a small budget I suggest that you go for the keyword rich domain name approach.

Choosing a keyword rich domain name does not mean that you will have to end up with a name that nobody will ever remember. That can be the case but it doesn’t have to be. Let us say that you are going to create a site that deals with pets. Maybe you want to sell pet toys and other accessories.

What I would do is to go to the site called: http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html and sign up for the free trial. Once you have received the e-mail from WordTracker you would enter “pets” in the field.

You’ll see that the word “pet supplies” has a count of 2,000-2,500 visitors in a 90 day period. If you had paid for the full version of WordTracker (I strongly recommend that you do) you would have found that for the keyword phrase “pet toys and supplies” and that 145 people are searching for that particular phrase every day and that there are only 857 sites competing for that exact phrase.

Now that is great information and you can now use it for finding a domain name that will 1) Tell your visitors what it is that you do and 2) hold some really great keywords that you will want to target to rank in the search engines.

If you go to the site called: http://idenion.dk/tools/multidomaincheck.aspx you’ll be able to enter domain names in the box and test whether they are available. I have just tested the domains pettoysandsupplies.com and pet-toys-and-supplies.com and both of them are available. That is great news as the domains names will help you some of the way to get the high rankings that you want.