Domain Names
July 21, 2011 
2 Comments
This is the next post in the series How to Build a Business Online in 7 Steps’
Step 2.3 – Domain names
A domain name is the address of your website. Google places some importance on the domain name when it looks at ranking a website. Not as much as it used to, but still significantly enough for us to consider the domain name as a good online marketing tool for our business.
What I encourage my clients to do, and strongly recommend to you, is that you choose 5 or more keyword phrases from your list and check to see if you can register those as domain names for your website.
For example let’s say I sell suspended ceilings and chose the following keywords from my list:
- suspended ceilings
- suspended ceilings tiles
- lighting for suspended ceilings
and so on…
What I would like to do is to get either the local country top level domain or the “.com” version of these keywords. If I cannot get either of these the next best would be the “.org” or “.net” versions of these.
So as an example, when searching for the availability of domain names for the “lighting for suspended ceilings” keyword, my list in order of priority would be:
- www.lightingforsuspendedceilings.co.uk (my local country domain).
- www.lightingforsuspendedceilings.com.
- www.lightingforsuspendedceilings.org or www.lightingforsuspendedceilings.net (these are on an equal par)
If more than one of these are available it is up to you if you want to acquire all of them. The more you buy the less there are available for your competition and the more opportunities you have to get your website seen.
Try not to use domain names containing hyphens such as www.lighting-for-suspended-ceilings.com these come across as spammy. If you have an absolute must have keyword and the only version available contains hyphens make sure to use no more than two hyphens such as www.lighting-for-suspendedceilings.com.
Once you have acquired these domain names what do you do with them?
That’s easy. Simply point them at the content on your website that is relevant to that domain name.
For example my www.lightingforsuspendedceilings.co.uk domain name would point to my article on “Lighting For Suspended Ceilings”. This congruity between domain name and content will be rewarded by Google as you are making your visitors experience the most relevant to the topic of the domain name it can be. It’s not rocket science.
EXERCISE
Choose 5 keywords that you would like as domain names and then register them.
Coming Next…
Putting tracking in place on your website.
Related posts:
Question
Do “-“ hyphens in a domain name do anything?
Would http://www.garage-reading work just as well as http://www.garagereading
Andy,
Domains with hyphens are OK to a point. Google, for example, sees hyphens as spaces so still sees the separate words in the domain name. However a word of warning, don’t use more than 2 hyphens in a domain name. My tests have shown it is harder to rank a website that breaks this rule as Google starts to view the domain as spammy. It is better to register a “.net” or “.org” version of the domain without hyphens than to register a “.com” or “.co.uk” with them. I hope this helps.