How to Design a Website
| Selecting the Right Domain Name |
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Before you panic that the domain name(s) you want has already been taken, don’t! The most important part of any website is content. Without good content search engines won’t rate you highly in their results and visitors won’t stay or return. Good content is worth more than a good domain name. However, having a good domain name will help you get your visitors to keep coming back to you, it just needs to be easy to remember and easy to type as well. When thinking of the right domain name, or trying to find one that hasn’t been taken, take a little time about it. Here’s a few steps that will help: 1/ Try your own company name first 2/ In one or two words what product or service do you or your company offer? 3/ If you are a business do you work within a geographical area? 4/ Do you offer a particular product or service? This may all seem simple stuff, but many people or companies fail to think of the basics first. Once you have given these four points some thought the following is a guide on how you should be able to find the best domain name(s) for you. Buy more than one domain name This is an important phase of launching a web site or ecommerce enterprise. Its a case of getting their before your competitors and ensuring visitors have as much opportunity to get to your website as possible. If someone knows of your company name, then that will be the first domain name they will try. So thats the first place to start Company name is Example Ltd so go for example.co.uk, then also purchase example.com as well. This way, if a visitor types in the wrong domain name, they won’t be directed to one of your competitors. The other names you should be thinking of are product or generic names. If Example Ltd makes internet security software then it should look to purchase the obvious name such as internetsecuritysoftware.co.uk and the .com domain. Don’t just limit yourself to one, if you or your company work in several fields then get domain names for all of these. They will only cost about £9 per year, so its worth investing in a few at the start Buy domain nams with hyphens It used to be thought that domains with hyphens were hard to remember and should be avoided as visitors would struggle to type the correct domain name. However, search engines are a web designers best friend and search engines can pick out the name in domians with hyphens better than those without. So in our example, we have purchased internetsecuritysoftware.co.uk and .com, now we need to purchase internet-security-software.co.uk and .com. Buy domian names with the top keywords Use an internet keyword tool to find what are the top keywords for your area of business and then buy domain names with these keywords in them. For our example, the company offers internet security software, and the top keywords from Google’s keyword tool are:
Just for good measures...
Look at your two or three main domain names and buy domains with slightly incorrect spelling or plurals. This is working on the human error factor rather than maximisng your results of search engine algorithms. Working with multiple domain names If your are intending to submit all your domains to the search engines, make sure they point to relevant pages. The product or generic pages should point to the product area etc. If you don’t and you point each domain to your homepage and submit them all to the search engines you will get your site delisted and so undo all your work and your time will have been wasted. If you take your time, invest in your domain name(s) then your website will benefit and you will see an increase in visitors, but only after you have ensured your content is relevant, useful and up to date. |
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