Text Speak in Domain Names

Using the number 2 instead of the word ‘to’, the number 4 instead of the word ‘for’, etc is a great way to create a snappy-looking domain. In reality, though, they’re a pain in the backside. Every time you spell your domain out for somebody, you’ll have to say ‘number-4′, or ‘letter-U’. It’s very clunky.

An additional problem is that to experienced web users, these domains look a little sleazy … and often akin to virus-laden or spam-creating sites. Not very professional.

The hyphen – hot or not?

Last week we teased you with a few funny domain name examples that could easily have been saved with hyphens … Pen Island could have rescued their site www.penisland.net with nothing but a little dash, and so could www.expertsexchange.com. Hyphens are sometimes strongly recommended!

However, when you have a full business name in your URL, hyphens just add to the length. Also, they aren’t part of many computer users’ ‘defaults’ – if someone can’t remember your website, they are unlikely to try with hyphens between the words. Only use in cases of hilarious misunderstanding.

Should I use a business acronym?

Many businesses are known both by their staff and clients as an acronym of their proper name – for example, NAB for the National Australia Bank. Should you use the acronym as your domain name, though?

It all depends on how commonly you use your full name, or your acronym. Full names may have a little advantage in terms of SEO (giving the search engines keywords to feed off), but if your customers are more likely to search for ‘www.nab.com.au’ than ‘www.nationalaustraliabank.com.au’, you should make things easier for the humans whenever possible.

Buying an existing domain

Sometimes you’ll have the opportunity to buy an existing domain name that fits your business. They cost A LOT compared to getting a new domain, but sometimes have quite a bit of money invested in them, in terms of SEO. Have a web marketing expert check on the domain’s Google performance – if it has a good SEO basis, it might be worth the extra expense.

Selecting your domain extension

The most recognizable extension is the dot com, although most users will also try your country code extension if they can’t find your site immediately. It is always worth registering a dot com, and a dot com dot AU, or CA, or TH, or whatever the case may be… even if you intend to use .org or .net as your primary website. Otherwise, people who don’t remember your address properly might land at a competitor’s website at the .com, instead of yours.

If you will be serving international visitors on your site, a simple .com extension makes the most sense – having a country code could scare away some visitors who believe that you don’t deliver or serve global customers. If you purchase both, you can direct interntional visitors to your .com, and local visitors to your .com.au site. You can be a global business, but still inspire local confidence.

Using your business name

Using nothing other than your business name as your URL is simple, and will help people that are trying to find you for the first time. However, it is not always the best SEO strategy. If your business name contains no indication of what you actually do, you are missing out on the most valuable element in the Google algorithm.

Using your keywords as your URL

While using your keywords as your URL is ideal for SEO, it carries its own set of problems. Users often expect businesses to be named after their URLs (or the other way round!), and may mistrust a site where this doesn’t ‘add up’.

Solving the dilemma – three strategies

Obviously, there is a dilemma to deal with when deciding whether to go with your business name or keywords for your URL. Here are a few possible solutions:

• Use your business name PLUS your keywords, if it doesn’t make the URL too long
• Use your keywords and your businesses initials only
• Change your business name to include your keywords, if you’ll be primarily web-based

Next week we’ll look at some of the less pressing, but still common problems in domain name selection!

There are reasons for that. Usually, the culprit of having your site not getting higher ranking in the search engine results page is the on-page aspect of your site optimization. All tons of efforts of off-page optimization are useless if there’s a problem with your site. Your site would have not been search engine friendly.

How would you know that your site is not search engine friendly?

If your site is employing flash, that is one factor of not having your ranking in the SERP improve. It is attractive to the visitors but in the eyes of the search engine spiders, it is a trash. Though spiders can read and index flash, it prioritizes less websites with flash for ranking. What the spiders want is text, lots of them.

Another thing that prevents your site from being search engine friendly is the JavaScript. If you got more JavaScript for your site, that’s really a big problem for SEO. Search engine spiders cannot read it. As a result, the spider won’t be able to know what your site is all about. You can hardly establish your site relevancy when you have more JavaScript for your site.

Though on-page optimization is also important in ranking, off-page optimization plays a more crucial role in getting higher position in the SERP and page rank as well. Link building is an internet marketing strategy that is categorized under off-page optimization. Through submitting your website to several social bookmarking sites, guest books, answering or posting comments for various forum sites, commenting to other’s blog entries, and posting blog entries with links in them are the most famous techniques of link building. Because of its effective results, the demand to hire link builders is getting higher. Internet marketers find it worth investing. To rank higher in the SERP, link building has become a necessity for any internet marketing site.

If you are looking for an SEO firm that offers link building services, always ensure that the company you are going to choose is already proven by results over time. Obsolete SEO firms still tend to do reciprocal linking or two-way link. This is when website A links to website B, and B in return links to website A. Of course, this sounds really ideal. But even if this method works, only a few realize that nothing beats one-way linking method. One-way linking method happens when your website is linked by the other, blog posting for instance. There are no hassles of asking various websites to link to your site.