Choosing Your Domain Name

If you went to a real estate agent to buy a brick-and-mortar storefront, what would be the single most important question to ask?

Location! Location! Location!

Yea, it is so important that it has become something of a business cliché. And in a very real sense, it's only slightly less important on the Internet. Your "location," of course, isn't your physical location on the Web, but rather your virtual location. It is your domain name.

The original purpose behind domain names was pretty simple.

Domains give us a human-oriented way to talk to computers. The IP address for this site is 64.239.32.190 and that is how ALL other computers will see us. Look at the Location/Address bar in your browser right now. See the URL? If you replaced our domain name, the whole rcarnell.com part, with our IP address, you end up at EXACTLY this same page. Our IP and our domain name are synonyms.

When you type a domain name into your browser or click on a link, your computer initiates a conversation with a whole slew of other computers, called named servers, who manage a huge and distributed database. The domain you typed or clicked is looked up in the database and the IP address that corresponds to it is sent back to your machine. THAT is then used to establish a connection.

Human beings, unlike computers, aren't all that great at memorizing IP addresses

Domain names obviously make it easier for humans because, unlike computers, we aren't all that great at memorizing IP addresses. But that's only part of the story.

If my web server unexpectedly crashes, or I decide I just don't like the web hosting company, I can choose to move my web site somewhere else. It will be on a different IP address, on a different machine, perhaps in a very different part of the country, but all I have to do is update that distributed database with my new IP to make sure you and others can still find my web site by using the domain name. That kind of portability is the original reason we have domain names.

But, in the E-Commerce world, it's no longer the only reason.

In today's 'Net society, your domain name is your identity. It's who you are. Or, to return to our real estate analogy, it's your Location (which is also very much a part of your identity). And, yea, it's one of the most important business assets you will own on the Internet.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Throughout most of our Promotion 101 section, we've talked about search engines and keywords. We've done that so you'll understand the importance they play in your success and because they are vital considerations when choosing your domain name. Search engines can change at any time, but I believe that including your most important keywords in your domain name can greatly increase your chances to get a good rank at most search engines. We saw what happened with keywords like poetry, poems, and travel - the domain that matched our keyword was invariably on the first page of the SERP. That's a trend that's hard to ignore.

However, while I think search engines and keywords are important, they are not the ONLY important thing to consider when selecting a domain name.

If I told you about a particular book and asked you to buy it, you might go to a search engine and search on the title or author. Or, I think it's equally likely you would head straight to amazon.com and do your search there. Why?

Branding is a major element in your marketing strategy

Branding is a major element in your marketing strategy, and amazon.com illustrates how effective it can be. Everyone knows about amazon.com. Everyone knows about yahoo.com. It's not at all unusual to find these domain names in the Top 200 keyword lists (not everyone knows how to use a browser to go directly to a domain). Surprisingly (at least to me), the third well-branded domain you'll often see in those lists is hotmail.com.

When it comes time to brand your e-commerce site, your domain name will be even more important than it is when you are just starting to build your company. Forget search engines, forget keywords, because if you can attain the visibility of amazon.com or yahoo.com, you won't need much else. Of course, that's a pretty big IF. Which is exactly why I feel, at least at the beginning of your journey, concentration on keywords is the way to go.

Branding and search engine optimization needn't be mutually exclusive

Fortunately, if you're a little careful now, branding and search engine optimization needn't be mutually exclusive.

Branding Your Domain Name

We've already talked a lot about keywords, so let's talk a little about what will be necessary for a successful branding campaign. Mostly, it's just common sense things, augmented with a bit of practical experience.

The best domain names will be short, memorable, and easily communicated to others. Very few people would have any problem typing amazon.com or yahoo.com into their browser, and that's exactly what your goal should be, too.

Your domain name should be short. For years, domain names were limited to 21 characters (not counting the dot-extension), but more recently that limitation was increased to 63 characters. But "amazon" is only six letters, and "yahoo" only five. The more characters a surfer has to remember and type, the less likely they will remember and type it.

Avoid words that are commonly misspelled or confusing when taken out of context. You wouldn't want to use "vacuum" because many people forget the second "u," or "lose" because it's truly amazing how many people spell it as "loose." Homonyms are equally problematic. Use "their" in your domain and you'll have a ton of people typing "there." In general, the best words are those which are phonetic and are spelled exactly the same way they sound. (If your word processor includes an auto-correct feature, like MS Word does, you'll find it includes an extensive list of misspellings. Speaking from experience, they should add "peoms" to their list, too.)

Where short conflicts with not confusing, always put your money on not confusing. The domain "iloveyou" is arguably better than "iloveu" and is way better than "iluvu." Trying to save a few characters at the risk of confusion is dangerous.

Unless you are registering a domain name where a number has significance (like 1800flowers), numbers can lead to further spelling confusions. Was your domain name widget7 or widgetseven?

Most of these pseudo-rules can be boiled down to one.

If your domain name was heard on the radio, would everyone understand it? Branding, in a very real sense, is just another way of saying "word of mouth." You want a domain name that can be verbally communicated to other people, with as little potential confusion as possible.

Unfortunately, really great domain names are no longer as easily attained as they were in 1995. Most of the common one-word names have long since been issued.

Or have they?

The dot-com portion of a domain name is called the TLD (Top Level Domain), and dot-com isn't the only one available. For years, we also had dot-net and dot-org, as well as dot-edu, dot-mil and dot-gov for those who qualified (and an e-commerce site doesn't). Less well known were dot-int (for international treaty organizations) and dot-arpa (used only for addressing and routing). Then countries started getting into the TLD business, and we had domains that ended in dot-nu, dot-tv, dot-to, and a host of others. More recently, the world wide TLD's were expanded to include dot-biz, dot-museum, dot-name, and many others. So, in theory, there's a whole lot of choices now. The domain poetry.com was registered way back in 1996 and is out of my reach, but (as I type these words) I could still get poetry.biz. Should I?

In my opinion, no. The dot-com TLD is still the reigning king and at least for the next few years will remain so. THAT is what you want for your domain.

It's important to understand why you want a dot-com rather than any other TLD, because that reason will dictate many of your other choices as well.

Let's say I registered the poetry.biz domain. With some great content and what we'll learn about search engines in Promotion 102, I feel confident I could rank well in the search engines and bring in some decent traffic. That's the good news. The bad news is that poetry.biz would be really lousy for branding purposes. Like it or not, the vast majority of Internet surfers have become conditioned into thinking dot-com and it'll be several years before the conditioning can be broken. When was the last time you read a news article about the dot-biz craze?

Every penny and all the time I eventually spent on branding would help my competition more than it would help me. I'm guess that half the people who heard about poetry.biz through word-of-mouth or advertising would later go to their browser and automatically type in poetry.com. And most would never even realize they made a mistake. Everything I did to promote my site, outside of clickable links, would send people AWAY from my site.

S I D E B A R Reverse this procedure, and you have a much too common trick for siphoning traffic from successful web sites. The tricksters try to take advantage of someone else's branding by registering domain names that are "close" to a well-branded domain. Then, they sit back and wait for surfers to make mistakes. This rarely results in a lot of traffic from any single domain, but domains are cheap to register and a few hundred such tricks can bring in a steady flow of stolen visitors. Like most such cheap shots, the untargeted traffic is very nearly worthless. Yet, unethical people continue trying. Don't believe me? Try typing "amozon.com" into your browser and see what happens. S I D E B A R

To Dash Or Not To Dash …

… that is the question. And it's a question with no easy answer.

The only characters permitted in a domain name are a through z, 0 through 9, and the hyphen. The hyphen, then, is the only way to visually separate words in your domain. For example, one of my domains is poetry-magazine.com, and you can easily see how the hyphen serves to break apart the two words.

This has a MAJOR advantage when optimizing for a search engine.

The keywords, in this case "poetry" and "magazine," are identifiably separate words and you can be very certain the search engine's spider will see them that way. As part of your domain name, each will carry a heavy weight and help your ranking.

Unfortunately, from a branding position, hyphens pretty much suck. If someone is listening to the radio and my domain is mentioned, what will they hear? It'll probably be poetrydashmagazine.com. If I'm lucky, it might be poetryhypenmagazine.com. If I'm really unlucky, we'll hear poetryminussignmagazine.com. And if the radio announcer just plain hates me, he's going to tell them to go to poetrymagazine.com - which is my competition!

The second best way to lose your visitors is to confuse them before they even get to your site. The best way, of course, is to send them to your competitors.

Additionally, there is an "accepted wisdom" floating around that surfers don't like having to type in that hyphen. They can't find it quickly enough on the keyboard? They don't like taking their fingers off the home keys? The logic is a little vacuous, and to the best of my knowledge, there's been no reliable studies. But the "wisdom" persists and, as a result, many web masters continue to avoid the hyphen. I honestly have my doubts whether surfers are that fussy, but I'm also not sure it matters. Whether they dislike it or not, it does result in confusions and will eventually hurt your branding efforts.

So, what to do?

One suggestion I hear frequently is to register your domain both with and without hyphens. The idea is to submit the hyphenated domain to the search engines, to insure you get the benefits of the keywords, and then use the non-hyphenated version to promote your site in all the other ways available. This makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately, it also creates its own rather large set of problems. Do you really want to maintain and update two web sites? We'll discover, in Promotion 102, that search engines frown heavily on redirects and mirrors, and unless done very carefully, using two domains can get you kicked out of the search engines entirely.

My own feeling about hyphens is pretty simple. Avoid them.

They hurt your branding efforts down the road, but just as importantly, I really don't think the search engines care one way or the other. Their software is smarter than most realize and, while I have no hard and fast statistics to prove it, I'm convinced they WILL find your embedded keywords even without the hyphens to separate them. Do a search for "poetry magazine" and my hyphenated domain, at most search engines, will come in significantly lower than does my competition with the non-hyphenated domain name. That's certainly not proof of my point (because there are many other factors involved), but I think it lends credence to it.

The best news, I think, is that even if I'm wrong today - even if the search engine software can't easily find embedded keywords in a domain name - you can be pretty sure I'll be right soon. Those SE spiders are getting smarter every day.

Domain Name Research

If I had been a little smarter, I would NEVER have registered poetry-magazine.com. Not just because the hyphen hurts branding, and certainly not because surfers don't like to type hyphens. I would never have registered it because poetrymagazine.com was ALREADY an existing and established domain. Every time I do something to promote my poetry-magazine.com, I am automatically promoting poetrymagazine.com at the same time. Not the brightest idea I ever had.