Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Choosing The Right Domain Name Is Critical - Perth Website Design Tips

By Neville Greenwood

The actual process of web design actually begins by selecting the appropriate domain name for your company or business. There are a lot of views regarding domain names and what you should be looking for when deciding on a name. In my experience it relies on how large your business is currently and whether your company name or brand is known in the community or marketplace.

I am going to "make up" an example. If you were the owners of the Coca Cola company, which has a brand that is worldwide and is very well recognised by a majority of people across the world, there would be no point in selecting a domain name such as sodapopDOTCOM or carbonateddrinkDOTCOM to capitalise on keyword searches. Most people know of the business and brand and would go searching on the internet for your company under cocacolaDOTCOM . Using keywords in your domain as a strategy in your website designing process would be a complete waste of time.

If you are reading this article then you are probably a small to medium business that works in a local area or maybe nationwide. You want to maximize the number of visitors to your site for the least amount of cost. Often the best way of doing this is to have a 2 domain strategy for your website.

Let me explain this by way of an example. Lets say that you are a local tradesmen that constructs concrete retaining walls but your company is called TRJ Constructions. If you have no real marketing or very little marketing then the chances of someone looking up TRJ Constructions unless they know you is nil.

It could be that you spend a large amount of time optimising your site for the keyword "concrete retaining walls". You might do a lot of forum posting and blogging, you put yourself in many web directories, create squidoo and facebook pages etc. but that will take some considerable time and a some effort. For me time is money, so this will be an expensive exercise especially if you run the business yourself.

I think that one way is to get 2 separate domain names, one for the customers who already know you and the other for potential customers searching by the type of service you provide using key phrases. The first domain name could be concreteretainingwallsDOTCOM or something that closely approximates that. You might have to take concrete-retaining-walls-areaDOTCOM if there is a shortage of domain names or you will find some very close variation of that name. You would then purchase your company domain name TRJconstructionsDOTCOM as a likely example.

The keyword related name (concreteretainingwallsDOTCOM) will get a far better result in the search engines such as Google. If all you did was placed yourself in 5-10 free local web directories such as hotfrog and in Australia truelocal as well as a Google map with the same address as shown on your website, there is a good chance that you will end up on the front page of the search results.

You are probably wondering what am I going to do with the other domain name that I suggested you buy. Simply redirect the site TRJconstructionsDOTCOM to concreteretainingwallsDOTCOM This way you can put this domain address on your business cards and as long as you clearly put your logo or name at the top of the website, your customers will realize they are at the right website for your business.

By using this simple 2 domain strategy as part of your web design process, you can get free traffic to your website without all the costs and SEO work required using just your business name. If your business becomes well known, you have an option of putting the website on your business name domain or design a new website entirely.

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