Thursday, April 24, 2008

The Power Of Your Domain Name

Giving Your Online Business Powerful Domain Presence



What's the one make-it-or-break-it item that your online business needs

to stand out from the crowd and become a huge success?

The right domain name!

The domain name is what people type in when they want to get to your

site the part that comes after the http:// or the www. It's your

virtual real estate address. Having something they can remember without

looking it up each time or keeping it in their bookmarks to be lost

among the others is the best thing you can do to get repeat visitors

and word-of-mouth free traffic.

People say that all the good names are gone, but that's about as far

from the truth as you can get. Here are some simple guidelines that

will make your domain name -- and your business -- popular and

memorable web destinations.

1. Choose a Dot-Com

The number one rule is, go for the dot-com ending, which is typed as

.com. This is the Main St. of the virtual real estate world, and the

one that most people will type in regardless of what your domain

extension actually is. While .net and .org were popular for awhile, and

then .us, .biz and .name took the stage, people always revert back to

.com -- no matter how many fancy country code top level domains are

launched into the mainstream, like .cc, .ws, .to, .cn and others.

2. Choose something memorable

You want your business name to be your domain name too, if possible. So

if your flower shop is called Suzette's Flowers, you want to get

suzettesflowers.com, assuming it's available. If not, try adding a

dash, like suzettes-flowers.com or a secondary descriptive word like

suzettesflowersonline.com or prettysuzettesflowers.com. If you're

creative, you'll definitely be able to come up with something that

works with your business name and is memorable for your customer.

Keep in mind that if you use a dash in your domain name, which some

Search Engine Optimization experts say attracts more free traffic to

your site, you have to say the dashes if you use your domain name in an

audio product or commercial; so it would be "suzettes dash flowers dot

com".

Most people typing in your domain name later will not type the dashes.

3. Get another variation

If you're lucky enough to grab a great domain name without the dashes,

then you might want to get the same name with dashes between the words

as well. You can put both of them up on your server as mirror sites to

get the benefits of SEO as well as the ease of typing without the

dashes.

You may also want to consider getting the .net or .org or even another

extension to use as a sister site for your main dot com site... perhaps

you put your forum on the .net, or use your .com for your main product

and .net for your business background information site.

Even if you're looking for a domain name that you don't really think

will be available, using your creativity and trying a variety of

combinations should allow you to lock down a memorable domain name that

will attract people to your website.

Recently there has become a global option called ws which simply stands for website.


http://website.ws/derhine/