importance
of your domain name
Your website’s domain name is a vital tool in your company’s
marketing kit. After all, it is one of the ways you advertise
your business (albeit in a small way) but, more importantly,
it’s one of the ways your customers are going to find you
on the search engines.
As you are probably aware, search engines operate by using
an ‘algorithm’ which looks at different websites and categorises
them according to what it finds. A search engine ‘algorithm’
may look at your domain name, key phrases, titles and meta
tags on your website when it decides how it is going to
categorise your website.
So for example, if your site is a garden centre, try and
make sure that the words “garden centre” appear in your
domain name. This is an extra clue for the search engines
that your site should be listed with other garden centres
or in fact above them!
That’s one of the reasons why choosing
the right domain name can be so important.
You will need to think creatively about the domain name
you choose, because you may find that many of the most obvious
names, as they relate to your business, have already been
taken by someone else. The world wide web has been around
for a many years now and the most popular domain names have
often been taken.
However, new extensions for domain names are becoming available
all the time, (extensions are the bits at the end of the
domain names such as .co.nz or .com, .kiwi.nz for example).
Keep up to date with any new extensions as you may get
the opportunity to register the ideal domain name which
encapsulates your business. You will need to be proactive
about this, as other businesses will be trying to do the
same thing.
There are a number of simple rules
to keep in mind when deciding on which domain names might
be suitable for your company’s website.
-
Be sure to keep it simple. One or two
words is best, for example gardening or garden centre,
furniture or furniture design etc. Don’t be tempted to
cram in as much information as possible. Making your domain
name too long will mean it is too difficult to remember
and too easy to spell wrongly.
-
Don’t be tempted to use quirky spellings,
misspellings or abbreviations. You may know what you mean,
but chances are your clients and potential clients may
have a very hard time finding you. And they will almost
certainly have trouble remembering the next time they
want to visit your site.
-
It is also a good idea to have a second
domain name which is “aliased” with the first. So, you
can have the main one as something search engine focused
(like the topic of your business) and the second might
be your business's name which is used for marketing.
The cost of registering a domain name is $35.95 plus GST
for the first year and $29.95 plus GST per annum thereafter.
Domain names are registered at this price through a subsidiary
of the company we often use for hosting (Digiweb).
We would be happy to provide any assistance
you need in selecting and registering domain names. If you'd
rather send us an email for more information you could complete
our
enquiry form and we'll contact
you.
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