Domains and Business - Part 2 - What Domain Name?

Part 2 in a series. See Part 1 - Basics

What domain name should I register, and what should I do with it?

These are marketing questions pure and simple. Domain names are part of your marketing structure - they identify brand or they become one of your brands, and branding is what it is all about. Any good marketing book will tell you that picking and establishing a brand is the single most important part of getting your business successful.

If you are just starting off on the path of a business I'm going to suggest you find and register a domain for it first - then build the business name around that. This is MUCH easier than picking a business name and then having to find a domain that fits it amongst all the domains that others have already registered. In fact, many of the government registrars of business names today will accept a registered domain name as the business name because it is already guaranteed to be unique - a feature that they as business registrars strive to ensure. I recall being told by a registrar back in the mid 1970s that I "must add Pacific" to the name I'd chosen to be more assured that the name did not collide with other "Data Capture" names in other provinces in Canada - thus I ended up with Pacific Data Capture. But when I went to register my domain I chose the shorter "pacdat" but could not get the COM extension - so have PACDAT.NET.

Similarly, when I went to register DIGITALRAG, even in 1994, it was already taken in all the TLDs I could register under at the time - as was DIGITAL-RAG, but now, here in 2008, DIGITAL-RAG has come available in both COM and NET - and now I have them - 14 years later.

In this case, DIGITAL RAG is the brand I'm building. In your case you have to choose something that will be not only unique, but also that you can build upon in whatever fashion you choose.

This points up the fact that you can and should keep an eye out for your chosen domains, even years later. Having them can fulfill both a company need and add to the long-term recognition of your name and brand - and it can put a crimp in the potential for brand dilution. There are ways that having more than one domain can hurt you, but if you're careful they can be avoided. I'll get into that later. In most cases as you start your business' venture into the internet, having a small number of domains registered while only using one for your dealings is what you want to do.

How do I build branding based on one or more domain names?

I used to be of the opinion that shorter domain names were better - but time and technologies have made this rule of thumb obsolete. There are limitations, and there are human concerns such as complexity and misspellings, but in general the domain name should be as long as necessary to include the major key words you wish to be found under in search engines.

Today, businesses on the internet have an advantage over those we started back in the mid 1990s - the advantage of search engines and their categorization methods. Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and the hundreds of others that search out web pages and catalogue them for searching. The advantage extends to both the number of pages that link to a particular page and to the page contents themselves, starting with the domain name they are under - your domain name if you choose wisely.

Search engines give "points" for many things about any particular page, starting with points for having key words in the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of the page, and the URL includes your domain name. So if you want lots of people to come to your site to purchase your primary product, kumquats, then you probably should have the work KUMQUAT in your domain name - such as KUMQUATSFORSALE or UNIVERSALKUMQUATS

If you can't get your primary product into the domain name you'll simply have to work harder to get it into the URL by using sub-domain names and directory names and file names that contain it and whatever other products and key words you might want to be located under.

Here it is appropriate to consider having multiple domain names, each with selected key words that you wish to be found under. This includes misspellings too - especially if they might be "attractive" to spammers and other low-lifes on the web. If a potential misspelling (reversed letters, extra s for plurals, etc.) is registered by a XXX spammer it is possible that some of your customers will type in the wrong spelling and be treated to an eye-full of naked flesh or something equally sinister. Extra domain names should be "aliased" to the original site where they may be misspellings, and should possibly become separate sites of their own (with appropriate links to your main site) if they include key words that are different from what your main domain has - we'll cover both of these in a future article including why and how.

What I have just briefly outlined above is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it is now a recognized job description in the web world. Getting the search engines to recognize your company's unique brand and position in the forest of web sites and pages is neither easy nor quick. It will involve time and effort that you can either hire or put in yourself.

You will be offered "top position" as an incentive to purchase all manner of services, tools and techniques, but I'll say here and now that for most people with small companies there is nothing you can purchase from most of these self-styled SEO companies that will be worth the money in the long run. Yes, your domain may show up "at the top" when searching for some terms, at least for a short while, but the reality of the game is that the search engines are always changing the way they do things to eliminate just this sort of quick rise in fame. It is a game of "whack-a-mole" where the SEO companies jump onto a particular technique that works for a short while, and the search engines program their algorithms to eliminate the advantage the next week or month. You pay, and in the end you may lose ground that is all but impossible to re-take later because you will be tarred with the brush of the search scammer.

In the long run, simply having good content that includes your chosen key words and phrases, on web pages with names that also include the key words, in a domain that may or may not include your key words, will work far better. Stay away from repetition (same content on many pages). Stay away from content that does not jibe with the key words in titles and headings and file/directory names. Stay away from really deep layers of content pages, and stay away from having the same content on several domains (having several domains redirected to the same web site is not the same)

You don't even need to keep your content all that "fresh" with new items added all the time. Doing so will get the search engines to come back more often, but if your business is fairly static in nature then just having the right descriptions of what you do, along with references to where you do it, who you do it for, and how to contact you, will do as much as is possible to do with the web for that kind of business.

On the other hand, if you can continually create new content that is relevant to your business, or have either your customers or the general public do it for you, then you will be ahead of the game in the long run.

Next: Domains and Business - Part 3 - The mechanics of domain naming