Choosing a domain name for your online business
Domain strategies and best practice advice
Here at Intelligent Retail, we try to help our retail customers by providing relevant, useful and above all profit-worthy information. In the spirit of this approach, here is the first in a series of articles all about trading online and how you can prepare your business for this with best practice methodology.
Choosing a domain name
If you're a retailer in the 21st Century, you've got to trade online. More sales are secured via the Internet than ever before, with trends showing an almost exponential increase in purchases via online auction sites such as Ebay and e-commerce enabled websites. To get in on this act, you first have to choose a relevant e-commerce software package and then you can think about choosing a good, memorable domain name for your new online trading business. Sounds easy... but choosing a good domain name is not as easy as it sounds!
There are many pitfalls when choosing a domain name for your business. Detailed below are a few pointers to guide you along your way.
How search engines work - the basics
Google, Yahoo! and MSN (and the majority of machine edited directories out there) rely on very complex mathematical algorithms to rate websites on various factors - the ratings are then turned into search engine results positions (or SERPS) for a keyword search. Each part of the algorithms have a part to play in presenting the end result of a search, some more than others.
A quite large and important part of the ranking algorithms used by the search engines deals with domain name (or URL / URI) structure. You can achieve much better results for your new online business just by choosing the right domain name, which is why it's very important to take some good advice before you purchase your domain and before you start to build your new website.
The importance of keywords
A large part of trading online is being visible in the search engines. To help to establish good search results in Google for your new business website, you're going to have to think long and hard what long term strategy you will be targeting for the online trading environment. If the main thrust of your traditional offline business involves selling 'widgets', then you'll probably want to sell 'widgets' online as well... but how do you exactly choose a good domain name to promote a 'widget' business?
There are various thoughts on the best approach to choosing a domain for your website, all based on usability and the search engine algorithm manipulation.
Search engine algorithms change all the time, but at the present moment it is still a good idea (if you are starting a new online business) to choose a domain name which not only reflects the nature of your business but also contains one or more of the keywords that you wish to target in the search engines. With this in mind, if your business does sell 'widgets' then look to get a domain name that contains the phrase 'widgets'. If you think that this theory needs proof, then take a look at the website of that giant of DIY retail B&Q... they trade online under the URL of diy.com!
So is that all there is to it? Well not quite!
What happens if you not only trade in 'widgets' but also in 'thingys' and 'doodahs'... this complicates matters somewhat!
If your business supplies a number of products then obviously you are not going to want to have an online trading URL which encompasses all of these key areas of your business. There are a number of reasons for this:
- A long domain name is hard to remember, even harder to type
- If you can't remember it, then there is little chance of your customers remembering it and referring others!
- Long domain names are not good for phone conversations with customers.
So what if you really do sell 'widgets', 'thingys', and 'doodahs' and really do need to sell these online? Well you could, for example register the domain widgetsthingysdoodahs.com or widgets-thingys-doodahs.com. Why isn't this a good decision? Well take these points into consideration:
- Apart from the aforementioned awkwardness of communicating and relaying these domain names to your customers, Google especially takes a very dim view of 'keyword stuffing'. The algorithms have been updated over the years to counteract search engine 'spammers' who have set up domain names with very long keyword strings in order to fool the search engines. Your website will at best be downgraded in the SERPS and at worst get banned altogether for keyword spamming!
- Hyphenation of domains has to be done very carefully if it is not to fall foul of the search engine algorithms. It was a favourite trick of search engine spammers and over-zealous webmasters a few years ago to hyphenate domain names in order to make domains not only keyword rich, but to attempt to improve readability. This trick worked for a while, but now it is thought that Google and others penalise the use of heavily hyphenated URL's for the same reason that keyword stuffing was penalised.
The bottom line is: Don't try to keyword stuff or go overly long with your domain name, but do try to get your most important keywords into your domain... or at the very least choose a domain which reflects your business area. For a company selling primarily 'widgets', choose a domain for example such as 'widgets.com', or 'widgetsuk.com' for a UK based business.
Domain names for established businesses
If you have a mature, very established business with an established brand, then the choice of your domain name is more or less fixed for you unless you go down the B&Q route and choose a very short punchy domain which perfectly describes what you sell.
If your retail business has been trading offline for many years, it is very likely that you will have a brand reputation which you will be unwilling to part with. Carry this over onto your new online trading environment in the choice of your domain name, as it is very likely that you will already have an online presence of some kind for your business. Add to this the recent Google algorithm changes which heavily favour brand names (possibly done to aid commerce in these troubled trading times) and it's clear that your domain name should focus heavily on your own brand if you have a well established business.
There are other ways of including keywords for businesses such as this, including creating keyword rich URI strings (page names), which are effective for website promotion.
A thought on regionality of domain names
Traditionally, the .com TLD (the TLD is the part of the domain which refers to the regionality of the domain) were associated with business websites in the United States. This has been somewhat diluted in the world-wide nature of the online trading environment, so that it is perfectly acceptable to use a .com for a UK based business if you can't get your desired .co.uk domain. There are, however, other reasons to choose a .com domain for your Uk based business:
- Dotcom domains can be registered for 10 years, whereas .co.uk domains can be registered for a maximum of 2 years.
- Because you can register a .com domain for 10 years, you can register it and then forget about it for 10 years!
So why is this important? Well a small part of the search engine algorithms used by Google deals with the registration period of domain names. Register your domain for the maximum period allowed and you get a very small advantage in SERPS compared to a company who registers for only the minimum period.
Why should registration period be of any interest to Google or anyone else? Well it all comes back to those spammers I was talking about earlier! Spammers use throw away domain names to do their evil work, so register domains for the minimum period and then abandon the domains. Registering for the maximum period disassociates your website from spam usage and increases domain 'trust' in Google.
Domain age - the big factor
One of the biggest ranking factors in the search engine algorithms deals with the age of a domain name. Look at search results for popular searches, and you will inevitably see websites which have very old (more than 10 years old) domain names on the first page of results. This is because Google and other search engines use domain age as a factor in the 'trust rank' of a website... basically the longer that domain has been registered and 'active' (i.e. displaying content and being regularly updated) then the more the search engines will trust that website.
you will see, amongst the first page results for any search term, websites which visually and content wise are below par, but which because of their domain age are given good placement and therefore excellent monthly traffic. The moral to this is, if you want lots of results fast then buy an aged domain name for your new online enterprise!
So how do you purchase an 'aged domain'? Well you could try doing a search in one of the search engines for the term 'buy aged domains' or something similar. There are a lot of online businesses who trade in old, aged domains. Choose a domain that is:
- Over 7 years old if possible
- Represents a similar area of business to your own
- Has had a fully active website for the period of registration
To sum up:
- Choose a short, punchy domain name which is memorable
- Try to get a keyword into your domain name which is both strategically important and descriptive of your business
- Avoid keyword stuffing as it will get you penalised
- If you have an established offline business then work with the strengths of your established brand
- Register for the maximum period for the maximum search engine benefit
- Register, if at all possible, an aged domain name for your new online business.
