42 Killer Domain Secrets Exposed!
Part One of Two

By Jim Symonds Copyright © 2004

The Basic Stuff

Every website needs a domain name. Example "WebBootCamp.com" is a domain name. Your domain is your website address, a.k.a. URL (universal resource locator). Should you use your company name for your domain? Maybe, maybe not. Is it memorable? Easy to spell? Does it contain keywords that relate to your business? For more considerations on choosing a domain, I've put together the following checklist.

Pick a memorable name. How catchy is it? Would the average person be able to remember just your website name, without looking through their bookmarks (if they have even bothered to bookmark it, that is)?

Make it easy to spell! Face it, most people can't spell. Try to target for the masses when you pick your name. Think of everyone having a 7th grade education.

Make it short, try for a two or three word domain. When possible, name your company the same as your domain name. Whether you actually add .com to your company's name makes little difference.

Use keywords in your domain. Try services like Overture, Google, and wordtracker.com to see what people are searching for, in BIG NUMBERS, related to your subject.

Don't use numbers or hyphens. These are easily overlooked or forgotten when people type in your domain. Unless you're using a stand out combination like 911alert or 123homerepair, don't go numeric. If you use hyphens, then every time you tell someone your domain, you have to say "it's blah-blah-blah.com - with the hyphens". This is not impressive, and you risk losing traffic to blahblahblah.com. You're asking your potential customers to work harder, to remember tedious details about your name. Simplicity is important, because you want them to find you. You're building a brand here.

Don't buy any other extension except a ".com" This is the best branded domain extension, highly known and trusted. Any other extension is practically worthless, in my book. In addition to being first in the minds of the public, remember also that most people trying to find a company will put a .com after that company's name in their browser. It's second nature to most of us. A .org can bring attention for non profits, but even most of those companies will try to purchase a .com as well.

Avoid running names together that end in a vowel and begin in a vowel. EXAMPLE: freeebook.com Also try to avoid having the second word start with the same letter as the last letter of the last word. These combinations can look weird, and are often likely to be misread or simply forgotten. By avoiding these two combinations, along with numbers and hyphens, we make sure our words (and our brand) will stand out. EXAMPLE: WebmasterNow.com

Good For Starting Sentences, Not Domains

Avoid starting your name with THE, or A, if being used as the word A. EXAMPLE asimplehome.com - "a" is likely to be forgotten. While it is true that directory listings usually list alphabetically, search engines do not.

If you can come up with a catchy name starting with "a", by all means, do so. You may find yourself first in the yellow page listings. Have a look there first, and see what the competition looks like. What are their names, how do they rank?

Now, here's where it gets interesting. You'll see that names starting with numbers get displayed first (for non paid listings). So the big question becomes, is yours the type of product or service that will do well from yellow page traffic? You must carefully weigh this against overall branding of your company.

You could, of course, have more than one domain, and more than one brand for your company, but be careful about promoting the same sites with different names to the same search engines. You could find yourself banned from those search engines altogether.

Brand New?

Don't pick your name as your domain name, unless you're famous. Names aren't keywords (won't help your search engine rankings), and are usually easily forgotten. Unless you've built a big brand around your name already, stick to a good key phrase! It is much easier to brand.

Who's who, and is my name taken?

To search available domains, and to find out who owns registered ones, use the whois function at http://www.internic.net. If you come across a registered domain, it will show you where it was registered. The next step to detecting the identity of the actual owner is to visit the registrar (this is where the domain was registered) and use their whois search. This should provide you with name, address, phone number and email of the rightful owner. Unfortunately, this information is not always available, but it is most of the time.

A Common Myth Equals Missed Opportunities

All the great domains are taken. Hogwash! The dirty little secret is, thousands of great domains expire every day! Here's a handy resource for finding great expired and expiring domains - http://deleteddomains.com - I've found some real gems here, like webbootcamp.com, webmastertoolset.com, customoilpainting.com and customoilpaintings.com - all formerly owned and let go, just to name a few.

When applicable, do try to get the singular and plural versions of your domain like we just saw with customoilpainting(s). When one could be easily be mistaken for the other, it helps to be covered this way. You're also protecting your brand.

Another expiring domain service to check out is snapcheck.com. They have some interesting statistics for expiring domains, such as google page rank and yahoo and dmoz listed domains. Bear in mind that any "perceived value" on a domain put there by a search engine listing or page rank is inherently fleeting. That's because the content that was responsible for that listing is now gone, and it is simply a matter of time before the search engine's spiders crawl the site again, and re-evaluate it's content. In other words, the search engine ranking is very likely going to disappear soon, unless you quickly repopulate the site with compelling content, worthy of the rank the original site had.

Roads To Nowhere, No Stops Ahead

One tasty bonus that accompanies a popular site is link popularity. This is how many other websites link to the domain in question. Think of a link as a road into your website. Quite often, webmasters do not update their links when the site they're linking to changes or disappears altogether. So if you find an expired (or soon to be expired) domain with high link popularity (many links to the domain), it may well stay that way for some time to come.

Case in point: special-report-network.net was once a very successful ad network run by online marketing guru Allen Says. For reasons unknown, he shut down the site and let the domain expire. The domain had over 14,000 links pointing to it! The weird part is, it still does! Want proof? Go to alltheweb.com and search for "link:http://www.special-report-network.net", without the quotation marks. This will show all the sites linking to it. The domain got snatched up by Ultimate Search, a hong kong company that registers thousands of domains, and makes money from paid search results. The site has nothing to do with the original ad network site that Allen built and made successful, yet the links remain, and links equal traffic.

Bear in mind not all links are created equal. Link farms (A.K.A. FFA or "free for all" links pages), are seldom visited by real people. Instead, automated programs add people's URLs when they submit to a mass submission service, hoping to generate big traffic. Instead, all they get is a bunch of spam, which they've agreed to receive, in order for using the service.

We will conclude this article in next week's edition of Etips.

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