Wednesday, 14 March - 10:05 Category: e-marketing, Links

Which Domain Should I Buy?

SYNOPSIS:  What domain names should you purchase?  Consider, misspellings, new products and services, keyword domains and, of course, the renewal date!

Domain management is something you definitely need to be looking into -- and soon!  Your domain name is one of the most significant pieces of Internet real estate you have, partly because of its uniqueness and partly because of its prevalence in your marketing collateral. 

In this posting I want to touch on two key areas of consideration with respect to your domain name.  Firstly, the type of domain names you should get your hands on and secondly, remembering to renew them! 

Most of us have one or two domain names and they are typically the name of our business.  Why would you need more?  Well, let's consider a few scenarios: 

The Misspelling

Our primary domain name is www.morganwylie.co.uk.  Now most people can spell Morgan but it's rare somebody spells Wylie right first time.  So you get a whole host of variations (Wyley and Wiley to name but two).  This happens so regularly we decided to buy the .co.uk variants and direct them to the correct domain name.  Take a look at your domain name and see if there are phonetic variations.  For example, if your company name was www.theeyesite.co.uk you may also want to consider buying www.theeyesight.co.uk.  Also watch for plurals for example, if you are www.theshoefactory.co.uk consider buying www.theshoesfactory.co.uk. 

The other one to consider is a mistyping of your domain (although I don't consider this to be too significant). 

The New Product or Service

Congratulations on launching your new product/service!  Now rush out, buy the domain name and point it to the specific area of your website to which it relates.  (You may also want to buy variations based on the above.) 

Here's a little anecdotal fun.  As some of you may know one wing of our businesses is the supply of Sophos products and one of the key products in Sophos's portfolio is called "Sophos Anti-Virus" (unsurprisingly).  To my utter amazement Sophos failed to register the domain name www.sophosantivirus.co.uk and guess what, one of their resellers bought it!  Now in my opinion, someone at Sophos should be shot for missing that!  By the way, please don't visit our competitor, go to www.morganwylie.co.uk/sophos  :-) 

The Keywords Domain

Search engines look favourably on websites whose domain name has specific relevance to the target keywords.  For example, if someone searches for "garden gates" and you happen to own the domain name www.gardengates.co.uk the search engines will naturally improve your ranking (assuming your website's content fits the keyword).  Sadly, many of these generic domain names have been snapped up but you may get lucky and it is well worth looking. 

Don't forget to make sure you aren’™t violating any trademarks when you register your domain name. 

And Finally, The Renewal

Once you have purchased your domain name it's easy to forget that you need to renew it.  Make sure that you put the expiry date of all your domain names into your diary and make absolutely sure you don't forget to renew them.  The last thing you want is to pay a hefty fee to a cyber-squatter just to get back what was rightfully yours.  And don't think that they aren't watching for domains which lapse because they do and your domain's renewal date is public knowledge. 

Incidentally, I know how easy it is to do this as we forgot to renew our www.morganwylie.com domain -- never again!  And recently one of our customers had to pay £3000 from a cyber squatter just to get back the .co.uk variant of their own company name!
 

I'll leave you with a great website you can use to identify lots of information about your existing and unregistered domain names.  Take a look at www.whois.sc.

P.S.  When you're looking around for the right domain name don't forget to look for .com and .net as well as .co.uk.  Other top level options like .biz and .ltd.uk are of less relevance.  If you're looking for a more complete list, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain or have a chat to your ISP.

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Wed, Mar 14th 2007, 10:05