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Many businesses are finding it valuable to use a search
engine-friendly domain name as their primary website
address and additional domain names as other means for
Internet users to locate their website. Some will
register the same name in additional suffixes (such
as .net, .us, .info, .biz, .org) in order to further
protect their proprietary rights. And others register
product names, employee names, and additional names
that correlate with their business. When it
comes to choosing domain names, here’s Three Important
Factors to Keep in Mind:
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Search Engines – Search Engine Friendly Domain Names
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Advertising/Marketing – Catchy Phrases, Easy To
Remember Anagrams etc.
-
Additional Spellings/Common Typos etc. – Make It
Easier To Be Found
Registering
Domain Names To Increase Search Engine Placement
In
order to increase traffic to your website, you will
want to register at least one domain name that is Search
Engine Friendly!
To
create that Search Engine Friendly Domain Name you must
first choose keywords that relate to your business or
website. To do this, put yourself in the position
of your potential customers and decide what words or
phrases (search engine jargon for this is Keywords)
they would type in to find a website such as yours.
For example, if you have a travel agency (Pacific Travel
and Cruise) and you specialize in cruises out of Seattle,
your most valuable Keyword(s) could be Seattle Cruises.
Now
that you have chosen keywords, you will want to create
a domain name. While a customer-friendly domain
name would be hyphen-free, a domain name created for
search engine submissions can use hyphens wherever a
space would be noted. For example:
Seattle-Cruises.com
(please note: Domain Names are NOT case sensitive)
The
reason for including the hyphen/dash in your “Search
Engine” optimized Domain Name registration is because
many search engines read the hyphen as a space mark
so instead of reading your domain name as SeattleCruises
they see Seattle Cruises and since people type
in their search queries using spaces, the Search Engines
may find a perfect or close to perfect match with this
domain name; thus, your listing may appear higher on
the results page for this keyword phrase! (And,
Your customers can still use your “customer friendly”
domain name (e.g. pacifictravelandcruise.com) that may
be easier for them to remember.)
Now,
whenever you sign your site up for search engines, directory
listings, or links – the website address you would want
to submit is your Search Engine optimized Name:
Seattle-Cruises.com, and leave your customer-friendly
domain name for your business cards, advertisements
etc.
Your
next step is to utilize your keyword phrase as titles
and headings in your webpage. The search engine
may read over (spider) your site and may look for the
correlation between your keywords, your Internet Address
(domain name), your titles and headings, and your content.
A search engine friendly domain name that is a close
match to your content may increase your rankings in
the search engines.
Registering
Domain Names to Aid Your Advertising/Marketing Campaigns
Whenever
your business starts a new advertising/marketing campaign
or is getting set to launch a new product or service,
you will want to consider registering domain names that
match your slogans, trademarks, and products/services
names. This not only protects your names, proprietary
rights, and products/services, but it also provides
your target market with additional ways to remember
your business AND find you online.
Perhaps
your marketing efforts focus on using an anagram of
your Business name. The World Wildlife Federation,
for instance, uses their logo WWF as a visual
recognition tool. They’re confident that when
someone sees their logo they will associate WWF and
the panda with their organization. Therefore,
they have registered wwf.org, worldwildlife.org and
even panda.org.
Don’t
forget about registering additional suffixes for your
domain names too. .COM may be the most
popular but your proprietary rights are further protected
and your marketing goals enhanced when you register
your domain name(s) in .NET, .ORG, .BIZ, .US (or .CA
for Canadians), and .INFO.
Registering
Spelling Mistakes and Typos.
Some
Business Names may be difficult to spell or may leave
people prone to making common typing errors. Your
name may be Stuart Contracting, but chances are some
people will type in Stewart Contracting when
looking for you online.
Take
Expiry Corporation, for example. We noticed that
on letters/checks/envelopes addressed to our business
that people were writing Xpiry and Expirey.
We knew that if some of our customers write our name
this way, then many more must have been typing this
while looking for us online. We now have xpiry.com
and expirey.com registered and directing people to our
website. And, these misspelled versions of our
names are actually bringing us traffic and sales!
Remember!
Expiry Corp. offers FREE URL FORWARDING with every
Domain Name registered! Your website visitors
can type in ANY of your Domain Names and will be automatically
directed to your website! URL Forwarding makes
registering multiple domain names easy!
Your
Domain Names CAN be more than just your business name,
and by registering multiple domain names for different
purposes, you can bring targeted traffic directly to
your website that may not have reached you had you not
had these additional Domain Names registered.
Copyright
2000 - 2003 Expiry Corporation.
Permission required to use any content.
Email webmaster@expiry.com
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