Is your domain name driving traffic to your site?

Your company’s domain name can be a strange bedfellow.

We all need at least one registered domain name to establish and showcase our little piece of real estate in cyberspace.

But domain names are more than just a certificate of ownership. Search engines allocate a relatively significant amount of weight to your domain name compared to other aspects of search engine marketing as a means of improving website traffic.

So without the right domain name, success on the Web will be just that little bit harder.

Legacy domain names

Ideally, your domain name should be highly relevant to your business, not overly long and as memorable as possible. However, it’s often the case that many businesses and marketers inherit a domain name that was chosen some time ago, perhaps when the Internet was still in its early years. The result is a less than obvious reflection of the name (or nature) of the business.

It’s also possible that business owners have found themselves in the position where the desired domain has already been taken and is therefore not available. There is little that can be done here except to use an alternative of mydomain.com either by extension, contraction or derivative.

Choosing a domain name

When choosing a domain name, you have a couple of options:

• Choose a domain name that contains a search term
  This will help with higher placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs) as a result of any keyword(s) contained within the domain name and particularly with an ‘exact-match domain’. This is a good choice to increase organic traffic over time.
• Choose a domain name with good branding
  This will help with brand building. This is a good choice once organic traffic is well established and the brand becomes more important.

A domain name that contains neither a search term nor a brand shouldn’t be considered a particularly insightful decision.

Poorly thought-out domain names

Domains that are extremely long or have words that all run together are often the poorest choices.

Listed below are some of the more infamous domains that have at some time been been registered:

1. Pen Island = www.penisland.net
2. Powergen Italia = www.powergenitalia.com
3. Experts Exchange = www.expertsexchange.com
4. IP Anywhere = www.ipanywhere.com
5. Speed Of Art = www.speedofart.com

It’s important to put some serious thought into your domain name BEFORE you register and particularly before you get your signage, stationery or marketing collateral printed otherwise it could turn out to be a very expensive exercise indeed.