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Your Domain Name

April 26, 2007

Whether you are naming your business or just picking out the domain name of your website, read this post. There are some pitfalls you can avoid and some of them may not be obvious until the time comes to work with a new marketing agency or webmaster.

For clarity: Your domain name is the word(s) between www. and .com. (or .biz or .net)

Here are some initial important rules.

Choose a domain name where the .com is available. If you get .net, people will make a mistake and type .com anyway. So some people looking for you will end up on the wrong website.

Do not be cute. We have an older domain using 2u in it. People were not sure when to spell it out or could not remember if it was 2u or u2. Even though it was very short, it was also very confusing for some.

Use keywords. The words in your domain will help your search engine ranking for that term.

Be unique. This is the opposite of the keyword comment. If you make your domain fun and unique, it will draw more attention.

— Buzzoodle is fun and unique, but also helps us rank higher for buzz marketing —

Don’t make it too long if you expect people to type it.

Think of misspellings and buy them too. For example, we own buzzdoodle and buzznoodle because we knew people would make those mistakes.

Registering Your Domain Name

The biggest reason I wanted to write this post is an issue I am seeing more and more around registration. If you find a cheap place to host your website and you register your domain through the site, you may end up not having direct control over your domain.

Also, if a marketing or web agency registers it for you, they will probably register it in their account.

The problem here is that you do not have direct control, and if you decide to host your website someplace else it could take months to get moved.

Often it is only a day or two, but more and more we are helping people move from other web agencies and we are spending many hours, and sometimes filling out paperwork, to get domain ownership transferred or moved. It is an unnecessary expense and can be avoided.

If you are signing up with an agency or a less well known - bargain hosting company, first register your domain at a reputable source like www.1and1.com or www.godaddy.com .

Set it up with your credit card and email. Set it to automatically renew. Then give your agency or webmaster access if you need them to configure the settings.

Later, if you want to move, you can change your password and repoint the domain to your new host and not have all the headaches that normally come with a domain transfer. We host websites for clients as well as do buzz marketing. Last year we moved to this practice because it is better for the client. Yes, you may spend $8 a year more (we used to include domain in the hosting) but it is worth it to you in the long run.

- Thank You!

Posted by Ron McDaniel | Filed Under Blog 

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