Visitors will only remember your domain name for a future visit if it is easy to remember.

    Which of the two domain names below would you more likely remember?

     http://www.webmastercourse.com/ or http://www.web-designer-training-course-part-1-learn.com/

Probably the first one. The shorter the better. Visitors will see the domain name, remember it, and hopefully visit again in the future if the domain name is simple and to the point.

Your domain name should be directly related to your offer or information available at your website.

For example, www.webmastercourse.com is directly related to web design training. In monitoring our website statistics, I've noticed that we have many visitors each month who arrive at our website by simply typing in the domain name instead of arriving through search engines, other links, etc. Of course, this was not so at the start. But, as visitors began coming, they began memorizing the domain name and repeating their visits in this fashion.

If possible, use a generic name that people might would type in without ever hearing about you.

For example, www.webdesign.com is very generic, and I'm sure many people simply type this name in to see what's available in the web design field.

Other "very" generic names I can think of are:

www.soap.com www.cars.com www.boats.com www.computers.com www.calculators.com www.food.com www.pencils.com www.skiing.com etc....

Although many of the most popular generic names are reserved, it would be wise to search for the most generic name possible in your field that's easy to remember.

The above tips will help you choose a domain name that will tremendously increase your repeat visitor rate. A website must first be designed, and then built upon a solid visitor flow. A simple, easy-to-remember domain name is a great start to reaching your goal!

The New Dot-Biz TLD compared to Dot-Com


Would a rose.com by any other Top-Level-Domain (TLD) smell as sweet? Some entrepreneurs seem to think so. They're betting that they can profit by investing in the new dot-biz extensions set
to go live this October. Once again, single generic words like "business" or "home" will be up for grabs for use in domains like business.biz or home.biz thanks to recent moves by Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation in charge of managing the Internet's TLDs.

While dot-biz is not the only new TLD soon to be available, it is the one most likely to challenge dot-com for a share of the domain market for businesses and the one first expected to go
live - making it the new TLD of choice for some. But how valuable dot-biz names will end up being remains to be seen.

Though the dot-biz TLD can clearly play a niche role as a less expensive alternative to dot-com, the dot-com extension has several advantages over the dot-biz TLD. First and foremost, the Internet grew up with the dot-com suffix and that three-letter extension has been firmly imprinted into the minds of every Internet user. This helps to explain why other General-TLDs like dot-net, and dot-org are not as popular or profitable as their dot-com counterpart.

Additionally, it seems likely that the biggest Internet players such as Amazon.com will buy up their dot-biz extension and merely redirect traffic to their dot-com site. Most of these companies have trademark rights to the name already and are allowed to apply for them before the general public.

This means two things: first, many very lucrative names will not be available for entrepreneurs to buy, and second that companies will not invest very much money to market their dot-biz extensions. Consequently the dot-com extension will not receive anywhere near the amount of marketing attention that went into promoting the dot-com TLD (don't expect the Super Bowl in 2004 to be for dot-biz what it was for dot-com in 1999!). Without this push, the dot-biz extension will probably remain in the background.

So it looks like the dot-com TLD will likely be the market leader for the foreseeable future. But while many of "the best" dot-com names are already registered, many are not being used. A recent study shows that as much as half of the registered domain names are not in use. The domain market will therefore center around trading names with the dot-com extension that have already been registered on markets like Sedo.co.uk, or Greatdomains.com. Here buyers and sellers of already- registered
names can connect with one another to utilize their valuable dot-com domains.

But while the dot-biz extension will not eclipse dot-com, it definitely will have an important secondary role as a cheaper and more accessible alternative to dot-com. Just don't think
that business.biz to fetch the $7.5 million that its dot-com predecessor did anytime soon.

It's quite common for a site to be referenced by more than one domain name. In fact, most sites are referenced by at least two: a www version and a non-www version. These are usually set up to
reference the index page on a site and produce the same results for a searcher.

It could, however, be argued that these are these same domain names. So the question remains: why would someone want to have more than one unique domain name for a single site?

Search engines - First, let's take a brief look at search engines. In the past, it was a very common spamming technique to purchase dozens, hundreds or in some really gross cases, thousands of domain names, all referencing exactly the same site. These were all submitted to the search engines, and many of them were indexed and blindly added to the results. This is how many questionable sites used to get top search results very quickly and inexpensively.

The search engines have apparently caught onto this technique.  At the very least, it has become common knowledge that this kind of spamming is not tolerated (sometimes common knowledge can be just as effective a deterrent as actual enforcement). I know that in the past it was normal to find many sites of different domain names but identical content in search engine results; today it's far more rare.

In fact, the top search engine, Google, bases it's ranking scheme on quality of links. What this translates to is you must get popular (higher ranking) sites to link to your site to raise your ranking. Thus, it's a better strategy to get as many links to a SINGLE domain name than to many different domain names.

With this in mind, it's now considered best by most search engine optimization specialists (at least those that know what they are doing) to only list a single domain with the search engines, perhaps with the www and non-www version but nothing else.

Multiple entry points - One technique that I use on my own site with great success is to have multiple entry points, each it's own domain name. Let's consider a mythical site in order to
illustrate how this works.

The site is about homemaking, and thus the main domain is "homemaking.com". Underneath this are sections about sewing, housecleaning and cooking. You might use "homemaking.com" for
link exchanges and search engine submissions, then create three additional domains: "sewing.com", "housecleaning.com" and "cooking.com" (although if you actually managed to purchase those domain names you could resell them for quite a chunk of change).

Each of these domains would use a 301 redirect (this informs any search engine that the page has permanently moved to a new location) to a specific page on the site.

Those three domains would then be used in different themed marketing campaigns. You might submit an article to a cooking site, for instance, which referencing cooking.com. For a newsletter about cleaning, you would use housecleaning.com. Each domain name is merely a shortcut to the master domain, but it is much more targeted than "homemaking.com".

Protection - If you own a business, it's a great idea to think of some of the derivations of your site name and purchase those as well. Thus, if you had a company named "xyz", you might also
purchase "xyzsucks" and "ihatexyz" as well. You may as well direct these to your site, but be sure to include 301 redirects, as you definitely do not want them in search engine indices.

Typos - Sometimes people misspell things, and domain names are no exception. Knowing this, you can get some respectable traffic by purchasing common misspellings for your domain name. Just
remember to use the 301 redirect method so these misspellings are not listed in the search engines.

Other TLD's (Top Level Domains) - If possible, it's a good idea to get the .com, .net and .org version of your domain at a minimum. I tend to get the .us (or whatever country is appropriate), .info and .biz versions as well. This ensures that no matter what people type they will get to your domain. Of
course, remember to 301 redirect these domains so they don't get listed.

For branding purposes, it's essential to get the other TLD's if you can. If you don't you may be embarrassed to find some pornographic or casino site has purchased your name with a
different TLD. The white house site (whitehouse.gov) is a classic example: the .com version has nothing to do with the white house (if you type this URL, be sure your kids are not present).

Other TLD's with different content - In a slight alteration of the above method, I have purchased the additional TLD's, but made each one slightly different. To use the above housecleaning example, housecleaning.com might be a page about housecleaning in general, housecleaning.us might index articles specific to the United States, and housecleaning.biz may include information related to housecleaning businesses. Each of these is just a page or two, and links back to the main housecleaning.com domain.

If you use this method, be sure it's honest and sincere. Do NOT do this to spam search engines (in fact, to be perfectly safe, set your metatags to stop robots from indexing those pages).  These are not intended for search engines - these pages are intended for focused marketing campaigns.

Regional content - If your site has regional content, you might purchase specific domain names to focus on that content. For example, if you had a stamp collection site, you could purchase
"my-stamps.to" for Tonga related stamps, "my-stamps.us" for United States stamps and so on. You could also keep it simpler and purchase "my-tonga-stamps.com" for your general site,
"my-english-stamps.com" for your English stamps and so on. These should also use 301 redirects to keep the specific domain names from being indexed.

Uses for the .NAME TLD - You might even consider purchase the .name TLD for your senior managers. Put up simple web sites about them, with links to your main site. These SHOULD be
indexed in the search engines, as you want people to find them if they are looking for information about your personnel.

Don't forget email - Remember you can get email on each and every one of the domains that your purchase. In fact, this is a great reason to purchase additional domain names - people can
send you email by different means. So be sure to set up the email for each and every domain to go to a general, "catch-all" account. It's a good idea, though, to heavily spam-filter this account as it can collect a huge amount of junk.

Subdomains - This is a great way to get much of the benefit of the above listed techniques without purchasing additional domain names. It does require a little more control of your DNS entries, however, as most ISPs and web hosts will not be willing to do these kinds of things for you.

In this case, you could define "housekeeping.com" as the primary domain, then "cleaning.housekeeping.com", "sewing.housekeeping.com" and "cooking.housekeeping.com" as the
subdomains. You should continue to use 301 redirects to keep the search engines from indexing these pages.

Renewals - Don't forget to renew all of these domains each year. At least examine each one when renewal time comes and consciously decide whether or not you need the domain. Don't let them expire without your knowledge. Someone else may then benefit from your hard work.

Other people's mistakes - Sometimes you might find that the domain you want is not available. In this case, take a look at the WHOIS record and see when it expires. Set up a reminder for 30 days from this date and every week or so thereafter. On those days, try and purchase the domain. Quite often, (especially these days) you may be surprised to find the domain has become available.

Other TLD systems - Companies such as new.net are offering many more pseudo-TLDs such as .SHOP and .XXX to the general public. I would avoid these new systems like the plague. These are at best bad ideas and at worst scams. They are attempts to supercede the official internet standard TLD system by companies with questionable motivations. They all require browser plug-ins or
other customizations to work, and some of them come piggy-backed with spyware and other malicious applications.

These alternate TLDs do not get indexed in search engines, and they may conflict with future TLDs added in the official domain name structure (and thus become useless). On top of that, they are extremely expensive.

In my opinion, it is critical that the internet domain name structure remain under the control of a central governing body.  While this body (currently ICANN) is not operating as desired by the majority, it's still much better being under one umbrella than splintering this all over the place.

Straight TCP/IP address - I am always surprised to come across a site which is listed in search engines, ezines and other promotions as a straight TCP/IP address. This is not only tacky and a sign of a spammer, it's not very intelligent as well. If you do this and move your site (changing it's IP), you will lose all of the traffic that you have so painfully gained.

Conclusions - The point is that owning more than one domain has many uses, although it is no longer of much value from a search engine optimization viewpoint. Instead, you can use the other
domain names to fulfill other types of marketing and to attract people from specific markets to your site.