Sunday, February 19, 2012

Web Domain Name Hosting - 5 Tips to Prevent Your Website From Being Sucked Up in a Black Hole

When looking for web domain name hosting there are a few things you should know. Just because you come up with a funky cool url, doesn't mean you should go ahead and register it. Unless of course you're building a website which you only want your close friends and relatives to know about...but then what's the point? Isn't it much more fun when your site is discovered by hundreds, even thousands of people from all over the world?

Especially if you're building a website for your business, practice, shop, charity cause or even fan club, you want people to visit your site. And, you'll probably want to make some money with it as well. Follow my 5 tips below, and you'll be off to a great start by choosing the right domain name.

1. Will your website be about a famous brand? In other words, is your business already well known offline? Then you don't have to make things harder then they are. Just register for web domain name hosting with your brand name.

2. Use a product name or job description in the url. For example, if you're a plumber named John Doe, your domain could be plumber-John-Doe dot com. When using a product name, make sure it's not trademarked.

3. Better yet, do some keyword research before deciding on any kind of domain. If you incorporate a popular or targeted keyword(s) in the url, you'll get a lot more love from the search engines. For example, people living in Huntsville will look for a plumber in... Huntsville. Your url could be plumber-huntsville-john-doe dot com.

4. Okay, so the search engines love keyword rich domain names. But they can be long and difficult to remember. Not to mention the risk of typo's. I've a great tip for that. Get two domain names. Seriously, a domain is the cheapest investment to make, so get two. One to please the search engines, and one to please the people you give your web address. Following the above example, you could print business cards, ads, whatever with your second domain name johndoe dot com. Does that mean you need two websites? Nope, all you have to do is redirect your short domain to your search engine friendly domain. That's an investment of $9 and 2 minutes which could create a massive stream of traffic.

5. For search engine optimization purposes it's a good idea to register your url for more than one year. So many sites are abandoned in less than a year that Google will pay more attention to domain names that have been registered for 2 or 3 years instead of just 1 year. Like I said before, domain names are cheap so this shouldn't cause a huge financial burden.

No comments:

Post a Comment