Listen up all you entrepreneurs and small business owners…before you start your company or launch a new product…the very FIRST thing you need to do before you do ANYTHING else is…reserve your domain name(s)! It sounds so elementary to so many, but I can’t tell you how many people I still run into that don’t do it.
Tips on reserving a domain name:
- In addition to reserving your domain name (before telling anyone about your business)—reserve social media urls as well, for example Twitter.com/YourDomain, or Facebook.com/YourDomain or LinkinedIn.com/in/YourDomain, etc.
- If possible, try and integrate a keyword in your domain…for example: ShubicWebDesign.com (“Web Design” being the keyword). BTW, the reason I used “Web Design” in my domain rather than say, “Web Development” (which is a more accurate term for what I do) is because “Web Design” is searched a whole lot more than “Web Development.”
- Reserve your domain for a long period of time; at least five years…this is a search friendly technique. All too often spam-type sites are registered for short periods of time and the search engines know it.
- Reserve possible misspellings or variations of your domain and re-direct those domains to your main site. For example, if your main domain is Web2Mail.com you would want to reserve WebTwoMail.com and WebToMail.com…if they were available.
- Don’t discount urls with dashes! If you have an online business where you are going to get most of your traffic from search engines, having a domain with dashes is perfectly acceptable and can offer up a keyword rich url where the variation with no dashes is already taken. For example AZWEbDesign.com could be AZ-Web-Design.com
- Lastly, there are a ton of Registrars out there, the two I’ve used the most are GoDaddy and Register.com, both are very good.
Please feel free to share this post by: Shubic Web Design
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Interactive/Web INFO, Interactive/Web TIPS.
