Archive for October, 2009

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How To Register A Domain Name

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

This post is the 2nd in a 4-part series outlining the essential steps in getting a website up and running.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name, you’ll need to go through the proper steps to ensure that domain is registered for your exclusive use. If you haven’t read our previous post on how to choose a domain name, we suggest doing so first as a pre-cursor.

There are thousands of companies on the internet who are more than willing to take your money in exchange of registering the domain name of your choice. However, you should do your research on the company you are planning to use to register your domain name before you go through with the transaction. Some things to consider before giving your business to a domain registrar:

  1. Typical domain registration costs from $10-$20 per year.
  2. Your Web Host is not necessarily the best option as far as domain registration goes.
  3. Look for a domain registrar that offers free 24/7 support…you never know when you may need it.
  4. Ask the registrar if the domain will be registered to you personally or if the domain will be registered to the registrar with you as an administrative contact. To avoid any problems, try to ensure the domain is registered to you personally.
  5. Look at the pricing options. Often, you can purchase your domain for 3 years for a much better annual price than you can for the standard 1-year registration.
  6. Ensure the registrar sends out reminders well ahead of time prompting you when your domain will expire and that you will need to renew.

One other thing – you’ll notice you can register your domain with country-specific extensions (.ca, .co.uk, .com.au, etc.). To register a country-specific domain, added paperwork may be required often needing you to prove your business is native to the country in question. Additional information can be found at the registration websites listed below, for some of the most popular international domains:

Canada –                        http://www.cira.ca/
United Kingdom –      http://www.nominet.org.uk/
Australia –                     http://www.auda.org.au/

Let me know if you know of any other countries and their national registration organizations and I’ll update them here accordingly.

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How To Choose A Domain Name

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

This post is the first in a 4-part series of essential steps in getting a website up and running.

Much like your business name is your identification in the commercial world, a domain name is your identification on the internet. Examples of domain names include the following:

www.example1.com
www.example2.com
www.example1.net
www.example2.net
www.example1.ca
www.example2.ca

Most businesses try and find a domain name similar to their business name, take for example how The Home Depot operates online under the domain name www.homedepot.com. Another option is to register a domain name under your most popular product or service, for example, if your business name was something like A&A Bicycles, you could try to register something like www.bicycles.com and have that as the A&A Bicycles website domain name. However, the likelihood of registering a domain name under your top product is probably quite small – most of the ‘popular’ domain names were snatched up well over a decade ago. So, for the sake of this article, we’ll go ahead and assume the domain name you want reflects the name of your business.

A few things to consider when planning your domain name, as taken from http://www.domainregistry.com/faq.jsp:

1.  A domain name can be up to 63 characters PLUS the extension (.com, .net, .org etc.) Keep in mind that domain names longer than 22 characters (plus the extension) may not  be compatible with older browsers, e-mail programs or certain Internet applications.

2.  A domain name can contain characters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), or both.

3.  A domain name can contain a dash “-” (example: psych-online.com).

4.  “Case” (upper or lower) does not matter with domain names. The domain name “Larry.com” is the same as “LARRY.COM” or “LarRy.Com”.

Once you choose your domain name, try and register that name with the “.com” extension, if available. Dot-com domain names are by far the most popular and widely used domain extensions, and if the dot-com extension is available, there is no point considering any other extension. To check and see if a domain name is available (unregistered), try using a service like that found at http://www.domains.com/.

I would also highly suggest you do a history search on the domain you’re looking to secure – looking into the history of that domain can reveal any possible previous websites that have been registered under that domain name that have since given it up. Something to keep your eye open for is any previous websites using that domain operating with a taboo theme like offshore gambling, illegitimate pharmacy sales or pornography. Registering a domain name with such a history can have negative effects on your future search rankings. Here’s a handy tool that will help give insight into any history a domain name may have: http://www.archive.org/

For those that are looking for a more creative domain name, I’ve come across a couple handy web-based tools that will help generate some ideas. The first is http://www.makewords.com/, which allows you to generate some domain name ideas for a list of keywords you input into their engine. Similarly, http://domain-name-generator.com/index.html lets you piece together separate keywords you may want to integrate into your domain and spits out whether any of the possible combinations are available or not. Lastly, we have http://www.nameboy.com/, which has been around for years. It’s a rudimentary domain compiler that gives you some ideas for domain names, even if you only know one word you’d like in your domain.

Once you’ve settled on an acceptable domain name, you’ll need to register that name. However, there are some important things to consider before doing this…so stay tuned for our next post on how to register a domain name!

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The Importance of Geography in SEO

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

When you drill right down to it, SEO is about helping websites build traffic through keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with what a keyword is, refer back to our post on how to choose the right keywords. For example, if you owned a bicycle repair shop, a keyword you might want to integrate into your website could be “bicycle tires”, or “bike repairs”. However, selecting the right keyword sets to use on your website is not as simple as picking out the first words or phrases that come to mind about what you sell.

A better way to go about the process of keyword selection is to start by describing your target market. Using the bicycle repair shop example, the most important factor in keyword selection for traditional businesses is to consider the geographic component. If your bicycle repair shop is located in Vancouver, you’ll most likely want to specify the keyword by including “Vancouver” in the phrase, so instead of using the keyword “bike repairs”, try using “bike repairs Vancouver”. Now at this point you might be thinking why you wouldn’t just compete for “bike repairs” as a more general keyword to capitalize on much more traffic. Well, here are a few reasons:

  1. Though your site would receive dramatically more traffic from a #1 Google position for “bike repairs” than it would for “bike repairs Vancouver”, 99% of the traffic you received from the first keyword would be of no use to you unless you sold to a global market or had a higher-end website that incorporated advertising revenue as part of the marketing strategy.
  2. Broadly speaking, you would be competing with around 3.5 million other pages for the keyword “bike repairs”, versus a much more manageable 271,000 for “bike repairs Vancouver”. This would mean seeing results much faster for a less competitive keyword once implementing your professional SEO strategy.
  3. Cost. To execute a workable SEO strategy for a highly competitive keyword like “bike repairs” would involve a lot more time and effort than a strategy executed for a more specific keyword like “bike repairs Vancouver”.

Ultimately, it all boils down to your market. If your market is located in a specific geographic area, definitely consider using a geographic specifier in your keyword sets. It will help ensure faster results with your SEO strategy as well as provide your website visitors with the search results they need.

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