Domain Formula
Choosing the right domain name for your online presence takes a lot more planning than most people think.
The choices are to use a keyword domain or a brandable domain name.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each.
- Keyword Domains
Pros: Good for SEO (search engine optimization)
Cons: Let’s be realistic, for each industry 99.9% of all keyword domains (typein domains) are taken, not only in the .com domain space, but also almost every other extension. To find a keyword domain today that is available for registration, you will probably need to have a large budget to spend at domain auction sites, or settle for using hyphens in the domain (example: Keyword-Domain-Name.com). Hyphenated domains are hard to fit on business cards, hard to remember, and hard to explain on the phone or radio.
- Brandable Domains
Pros: If marketed correctly your business and website address will be easily memorable. Looks great on business cards.
Cons: Does not help at all in SEO (Search engine optimization). Must be catchy, and show some sort of relation to your target market (there are exceptions, but these exceptions took millions of advertising dollars to brand). Your domain should be unique (not simialar to any of your competitors).
My advice is to choose a brandable domain as your main url (domain name), unless your profit margin is high enough to cover the expenditure of purchasing a prime keyword domain directly related to your products.
After you have chosen an available brandable domain (or purchased a nice typein domain), register a few keyword domains. Chances are that there will be a few hyphenated domains still available in most industries (these domains will be used for SEO, but a thorough explanation of developement of your domains will be explained later).
At this point you should create some information regarding your industry or products, and start to point all of these domains to the temporary website (this will help for future SEO).
And the last step related to domains, before directing your attention to full developement, is still finding more domains to register. These will probably not be available domain names, but expiring domains. Thousands of domains expire each day. The domains expire for various different reasons, but the one thing that you must focus on is finding domains that should already recieve targetted traffic, that is already looking for what your website will be selling.
Example:
Your product: Shoes
If you were opening a new shoe store at a retail location, would you rather have a new phone number or a phone number that was used for the last 5 years by a company that sold shoes also? Would you rather have a retail location that once sold donuts? or one that was a shoes store for the last 5 years? Of course you would prefer to have a phone number and location that would have people already looking for what you are selling.
This all holds true when starting a new website. If you have a brandable domain and website built, then start sending thousands of visitors everyday to your website. You are in essence branding your domain and website to your target audience. This will have a much more positive effect on your business than trying to use other media outlets to advertise through. (because unlike the targetted visitors to your website this way, whith conventional media advertising, you are not reaching people that are always looking for what you are selling.)
Many people today are really starting to realize this and the prices being paid for targetted traffic, and targetted domains are on the rise. You must make your move now, to secure as many related domains to your industry as possible.
DropWatch.com was created for just this purpose. Providing detailed stats that help in estimating weather an expiring domain should recieve traffic, and also shows a link to the previous use (history) of each expiring domain.
