SEMbyDesign

September 11, 2008

Your Domain Name – the keys to your (online) mansion

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Traffic Building — Tags: — admin @ 10:50 am

I have talked in the past a bit about the importance of a good domain name, however, this post may even be a bit off subject for this blog. Keeping your domain name in your possession.

Recently, I have taken on 2 new clients who hired someone several years ago to build their site, and then let the site just sit there(a whole other blog post). Long story made short, we are looking at revamping their site, changing servers, etc, and they can’t get to their domain name to make the required changes.

One of the domains has page rank, has been around for a while and is getting very good traffic. We are looking to add ecommerce to it, and the current host can’t do what we need it to do. Getting in to the domain to change the name servers is proving to be a tricky task since the web guy who originally registered the domain for this client is difficult to get ahold of.

Business Owners, you should know that keeping track of your domain is very easy, and if you don’t have control over it, you should do so immediately. If someone besides you has control, you could have a difficult time getting to it the next time you need to, and think of all the items associated with the domain – your advertising, yellow pages, and most importantly, your email address. You don’t want to spend your time having to inform customers and associates of a new domain name – this could result in uncountable lost business.

August 2, 2008

Picking a great domain name

Filed under: Marketing Your Site — Tags: , — admin @ 10:39 am

Picking a domain name is quite possibly one of the most important things you can do when you are starting up a site, and possibly one of the most difficult. Difficult, because many, many domains have already been registered. Here are some tips:
1. When you are researching, it is fairly important to have a keyword in your name – for instance if you are selling jewelry, you should have the word jewelry somewhere in the name.

2. Don’t make it too regional if you are thinking of a national or international audience – in the case of jewelry sales in Houston, JewelryDesignHouston.com would not be a good name if you were trying to appeal to a larger audience than the residents of Houston.

3. Unless you are a non-profit organization or a college or university, try to stick with the .com extension – no one can remember the other extensions, like .biz too easily.

4. Stay away from special characters and numbers in your name. Dashes and the numbers 0-9 don’t make for names that are easily remembered.

In general, practice trying to tell someone the name out loud or over the phone if you can say it without having to explain it that is best, for example, we’ll use 4example.com – “hello Bill, my domain is w w w . 4 the number 4 not spelled out example . com.” This makes for a very confused individual on the other end of the phone.

You can go to any domain registrar to find out if your name is available – if it is not, sites like Premium Domain Name Auctions should have a great selection of names, or people willing to sell you your dream domain name.

Powered by WordPress