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Posts Tagged ‘domain name’
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Start up companies in the future should perform a domain name check on any brand name before they adopt it. I believe this will become an accepted and common practice for new start ups in the future, both for large companies and for small businesses.
There are several reasons you’d want to check the availability of a domain name before you settle on a brand name. If the domain name isn’t available then you’ll have a real hard time getting visitors to your website as many will be looking for your brand dot com. It won’t be impossible, but it will be difficult. It’s best to avoid that hurdle altogether and settle on a brand name and a matching domain name at the same time.
I believe attorneys and CPAs will likely provide this service in the future along with corporation filing services. Some probably already do.
Because Internet marketing will be integral part of doing business in the future, any new start up companies that plan to have an Internet marketing strategy should not adopt a company name until they are sure they get a domain name that will match the branding. It’s just good business.
Tags: brand name, Branding, domain name, start up business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Every now and then I read an article and think the author has it all together, then they make a recommendation that I think is just a little off the mark. This article at SiteProNews is one of those articles.
The author is right on target with the importance of relationship marketing in the 20th century. And she’s right on the mark with her recommendation of Facebook and LinkedIn as social media tools. The problem is when she talks about blogging. Her recommendation is to use one of the free blog hosts, but I don’t recommend that at all. Here’s why:
- Your own domain name acts as a much better hub for your relationship marketing efforts.
- A blog with a keyword-based URL is going to get you much better traffic than a blog hosted on Blogger or WordPress.com.
- Updating your own blog at your web address adds new content to your website every time you create a new blog post and each of those updates is a brand new page on your website, giving you many more chances to rank for your keywords in the search engines. Bottom line: Owning the property is better than renting it.
- You can host conversations about your product, service and industry on your own web property.
- By drawing people to your website or blog you will make it easier for them to see what you have to offer and make it more likely that they will make a purchase.
This is just the beginning. Relationship marketing is here and more powerful than ever. The Internet makes possible what has never been possible before for the average small business. Having your own blog is not as expensive as you might think and it’s one of the best marketing tools you’ll ever have.
Tags: blog, domain name, relationship marketing, Social Media, website
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
If you’re new to online marketing you might be wondering why you see some websites with www in front of the URL in the browser and some without the www. Furthermore, you could be asking whether that www is necessary. Really, it’s not.
As far as SEO is concerned, you don’t get any additional search engine benefits either way. And as for branding, there’s nothing to add to the benefits on that end either. The only issue you’ll run into regarding the www in your domain name is with duplicate content. If you fail to point your DNS to the one you are not using then you could have duplicate content issues with the search engines. While there is no penalty for that per se, you could see some drop in rankings or a de-listing altogether of one of those – and it could be the one that you want to use.
To prevent those kind of issues, one of the first things you want to do when you buy your new domain name is point the DNS to one or the other. In other words, you want people who type in www to landing the site without the www, or vice-versa. To make that happen, you need to make sure your web host redirects all traffic from the one you aren’t using to the one that you are. Your host can help you get that done if you need it.
Tags: domain name, url, website address, www
Posted in website development | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Your URL is important for a number of reasons. Google algorithms change from day to day, but there are days where your URL can push you up in the rankings a few notches if it contains your primary keyword in it. There are times when it won’t. Overall, I’d say having your keyword in your URL is very important. It’s not a make-or-break it factor in rankings, but it can be a slight edge in the competitive dance if all else is equal between your site and your competition’s.
Nevertheless, your URL is important in other ways as well. It’s a great branding tool, for instance. In fact, you can brand your company with your website URL even without using a keyword. There are many examples of this:
- Flickr
- Google
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Facebook
- Digg
And that’s just to name a few!
If you mention the niche each of these companies exist within, you’ll no doubt think of these companies. Google = search engine, Flickr = photo sharing, YouTube = video sharing, Digg = social bookmarking, and MySpace and Facebook = social networking. The URL = the name brand. Powerful marketing!
This combination of URL importance is getting even better since Google is introducing a new feature into its Google Suggest tool. From Marketing Pilgrim:
Google’s also added navigational suggestions–so if you start typing the name of a company or brand, you’ll more likely see the actual URL appear in your suggested items.
What this means is that your URL could actually become a suggested destination or query result at Google for generic keywords that searchers type in. But for that to happen you have to establish yourself as an authority website in your niche. That means building unique and original content that increases your reputation in your niche. When you do that, you have a bigger edge and that edge is what it’s all about.
Tags: Branding, domain name, google suggest, url
Posted in Branding | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Your permalink is the complete long URL that you use for the address of your individual blog posts. An example of a permalink is:
http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/seo-for-small-business/can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/04/28/2009/
Let’s walk through it line item by line item:
- The domain name URL – This is simply your domain name. If your visitor is sitting on your home page, this is the URL that would show in her browser. In my case, that URL is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/. It’s important to understand, however, that this address is the URL of my website, not the blog.
- Blog Address – If your blog is your website then it may sit on the root domain. That would be the above-mentioned URL for my home page. But if your blog is a part of a larger website then it will have its own folder and will look something like this: http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/. internetmarketing is the name of the folder where my blog sits. Yours will be something similar, but you should name that folder something related to your niche and put an important keyword in it. This will help you with SEO.
Everything that follows from here pertains to the individual blog post. There are several ways you can go. First, you must decide whether you want to include the category name in your permalink. I have chosen to do that and you can see the category name in the permalink to the above blog post. It’s the part of the URL that reads seo-for-small-business/. The category name isn’t necessary, but it can further help identify to your readers the nature of your post.
After the category name (should you decide to use one), there are generally three other protocols in popular use:
- Date protocol
- Number of post protocol
- Post name protocol
It is generally accepted not to use all three protocols, but you can, technically. They can appear in any order, but I’d prefer to put my post name closer to the beginning to make good use of my keywords in the domain name. Analyzing the above URL, you’ll see can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/. That’s the name of the individual blog post. After that, the numbers represent the date of that blog post. The number of post protocol is generally a 3 or 4 digit number, like this: 231. That represents the 231st blog post you wrote on that blog.
Which of these protocols you use for your blog depends on factors that are important to you in perception and ranking with the search engines. However you do it, just know that you have options.
Tags: blog, domain name, permalink structure, url, website
Posted in website development | 3 Comments »
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