Thrudigital

People often don’t realise that a domain name is just one component of a website, and put too much effort into finding the perfect domain name, often at the expense of content. There are basically two ways to acquire a domain: it’s either available or it’s for sale. In the first case it’s very simple: you just have to find the desired name and register it (personally, I use GoDaddy). If not, you may be able to buy the domain directly, or you may have to enter an auction. Unless you are already earning money from your website (and you just want to change the domain), or unless you know that you’ll earn money from the domain you’re about to buy, buying domains is not generally recommended. Otherwise, I recommend you register a new domain name, instead of spending thousands of dollars to acquire one. So let’s quickly look at common mistakes people make…

Sponsored links

If .com is already taken, you can always try .net or .org This is usual for many domain names, as it’s nearly impossible to find one-word domains which are still available. Believe it or not, even words such as ordinarily.com (.net, .org) and customary.com (.net, .org) are already registered. Sometimes you can strike lucky and find less common one-word domains that are still available. As you can see, this site’s domain name is web-developers.net, because web-developers.com was unavailable when the site was being built. The website used to be thrudigital.com, but for SEO purposes we changed to web-developers.net. As you can see, the current domain name is more SEO-friendly, as it contains two very important keywords for our business.

You don’t have to own business.com to profit! It’s possible to do your business with any domain name (assuming the length and TLD are reasonable). Just avoid names like forstupids.com (.net/.org) because your visitors won’t feel comfortable when they see such a name in the address bar.

Hyphenation is not bad! I always wonder why many SEO experts say that a hyphen in the domain name is a bad idea.  During the last 30 days, I was able to attract more than 100,000 unique visitors to aqua-fish.net. Nowadays it’s very difficult to find a domain like “word1word2”, so why not buy “word1-word2”? Do you know why people often try to persuade you that a domain with hyphen is bad? Usually, because they own “word1word2” domains, and they’re trying to sell them on. They call such domains “premium domains”.

Personally, I like buying “word1word2” domains, but that’s just my hobby. I own about 30 domain names, and some of them would be suitable for this web-developers.net domain. For example, “ukwebdevelopers.org”, “londonwebdesigners.org”, or “webdeveloperslondon.org”. All three would be a good substitution for web-developers.net, but why change a domain when the current name is ranked well for many important phrases?

Long domain names may be bad, but they can be good too! Experts say that it’s hard to remember long domain names, and they’re right. But you can still achieve top rankings in Google with a long domain name. Right now, I see web-design-directory-uk.co.uk ranked 2nd for the “uk web design” phrase in google.com. So you can see, more hyphens, more words, and still perfect rankings!

In my opinion I wouldn’t buy such long domain names, but they can be just as successful.

Don’t think that someone is going to buy your new domain for thousands of dollars! People read “get rich fast” stories and think that some company will pay them virtually unlimited amounts for domain names. It’s actually very hard to sell a domain. So before you spend hundreds on buying domains, make sure that you have a plan for what to do next.

Don’t buy domains with typos! There are numerous articles on the internet talking about how ‘cool’ domains with typos are. They’re not. Firstly, people usually type correct domain name into the address bar. Secondly, typos are bad for SEO purposes. Thirdly, it’s hard to remember these domains. If a returning visitor wants to return without a bookmark, he/she may be frustrated by finding the “correct misspelling” to find your website.

Imagine this situation… IBM would buy YBM.com instead of IBM.com. It doesn’t make any sense and it didn’t make any sense to IBM too.

Numbers are OK! Of course, this applies to “natural” numbers such as 123, or a combination of numbers and letters such as “1st”, “2nd” or so. Domains like 568912.com are worthless unless the “568912″ is your company’s name. Sometimes a substitution works too. For example, business2customer.net, org can be good domain names.

Think about content Don’t buy ukcellphones.net if your website is going to offer content related to UFOs. I personally think that each domain should accurately reflect the website’s content. Here is a good example: solodvds.com is a website about aquarium fish (I found it because it’s a competitor to aqua-fish.net). But the name solodvds.com suggests it’s a DVD-related website. This causes two main problems: first, in terms of SEO it’s very bad because the domain doesn’t contain any important words. So if you’re going to link to this website, you have to use solodvds instead of a fish/aquarium related word. Secondly, if you’re an ordinary visitor, would you expect solodvds.com to offer fish-related articles?