Entries Tagged 'domains' ↓

I have confessed in this blog before, I have a bit of a domain buying ‘problem’ - as in, I cannot resist buying up good names… But naturally, I have too many to put up live, so I am selling off a whack of them. (Contact me for details on price.)
prosocialmedia.com
futuresocialmedia.com
socialmediaclimber.com
socialmediaphiles.com
B2Csocialmedia.com
socialmediaB2C.com
bizsocialmedia.com
socialmediafan.com
socialmediafans.com
churchsocialmedia.com
assetSEO.com
SMOideas.com
MSMtoWeb.com
MSM2Web.com
BackroomShenanigans.com  (perfect for these USA political times!)

More business presence online is better, right?

That depends… on how and where you locate that presence.

Case in point: I was chatting with the marketing manager of a national equipment distributor; his company recently spun off five divisions specializing in various products and services.

The problem: They launched five new websites, one for each division. That meant a dedicated new domain name (URL) for each.

Don’t split the focus (or dilute the Google juice)

Oops.. this company just made getting found online much more difficult!

Their “mothership” website - the original one that used to hold all their products and services - is 10 years old. Sweet. Google loves older sites, giving them more authority, and therefore higher page rankings, than newer sites.

In fact, brand-new sites are the worst off. Google puts them into “the sandbox” where you sit and wait for enough months to pass until you’re deemed by Google as not a fly-by-night or spammy site. Then you may, slowly, start to move up in the search result pages.

Staying with the mothership site, all the content of the 5 new divisions would have piggybacked on the “Google juice” (higher page rankings) that the mothership has accrued over the past decade.

The bad news

So what all this means is that this national company just:

• Downsized their mothership site by removing a lot of content to go into the new sites (Google loves content addition, not depletion!) and thereby hurting the mothership’s rankings.
• Possibly broke links that other sites had used to point to content that used to reside on the mothership.
• Put all this content into newbie sites that won’t get found online by anyone for quite a while to come
• Made all efforts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) less likely to succeed.
• Spent likely tens of thousands of dollars on designing 5 new websites.

It is this last point, I believe, that kept me from getting further with the national marketing manager after our first, very enthusiastic meeting.

At that meeting, I didn’t drop the bad news that his 5 new sites were a mistake; I told him in a sales call soon after.

Reality check: No one wants to tell one’s boss that they just spent thousands of dollars on Internet marketing that just isn’t going to work and, in fact, has to be dismantled as soon as possible.

Oh, and this large company also has not put in place any SEO to optimize the mothership - nor the new spinoff sites. I may still hear from them… as their web traffic and lead generation drop off.

Some people get hooked on playing Scrabulous (online Scrabble), others obsessively collect baseball caps… My habit? Hording domain names that I may never use but find hard to resist buying! I’m weaning myself off it now; I suggest you only buy names that will help make you money - and leave the cool-sounding words to someone else!

I got hooked working at an Internet publishing company whose owner got very rich, back around 2000, snapping up hundreds of thousands of URLs. The culture at that company encouraged domain name brainstorming and buying, as you can imagine!

I admit, I still love that breathless couple of seconds between when I type in my desired URL and hit Go, and when the search engine behind GoDaddy - one of the biggest registrars of domain names - delivers the verdict: Is Taken or Is Available!

“Available” comes in two flavors:

• Cheap: No one currently owns the domain; so it is for sale for $10/year or $20/two years.
• Expensive: The owner of the domain is interested in selling the name. That can run you from a few hundred dollars up to a million or more.

SEO and other rules of engagement for buying URLs

• Make sure your domain name is related to what you do as a business - ideally with at least one of your best keywords in the name. This will help your website move up in search engine rankings. (Don’t guess at your best keywords; hire an SEO expert.)
• Pick a name that is easy to remember to maximize word-of-mouth marketing.
• Buy the domain name for the maximum time permitted; Google likes to see that - it shows them you are in it for the long run.
• A one-word domain name is ideal, two words are super, three are OK if of those are short words and they suit your market, such as MySafeWork.com.
  
• Avoid having the same letter twice in a row; it makes the domain name hard to read and type in. (E.g. theelusivefish.com - apologies to my friend Rob Clark who runs this site).
• Don’t try to be clever at the expense of organic search practice. (E.g. www.2market2market.com. When’s the last time you replaced “to” with a numeral?)
• Leave the weird domain names or fads to those funky Web 2.0 sites that, as far as we can see, aren’t making any money for their owners. (E.g. Flickr, del.icio.us)
• If the domain that is your heart’s desire isn’t for sale right now, don’t despair. Keep an eye of the owner by visiting the “Who Is” database of Godaddy or whatever domain registrar you use, or a third-party “Who Is’ finder. You’ll find full information about the owner and when his/her domain ownership expires - so you can swoop in and grab it then, with any luck.

What’s in a name?, you wonder? A whole bunch, when it comes to search engine optimization. I.e. choosing the right domain name is another excellent way to Get Found Online.

You’ve had your website up for 7 years and you’re comfortable. Sort of like a site that wears stretchy pants and knee socks. But you realize your site isn’t all it should be - especially the fact that it isn’t getting found among the sea of competitive websites. Younger, flashier sites that are way more (inter)active than yours.

Who wants to grow old (sigh) so you pluck up your courage and become a whole new you - starting with a catchier domain name.

Stop right there: your SEO checklist

New lease on life with search engine optimization from stem to stern? CHECK!

New sex appeal with modern, eyecatching design (with good content:code ratio)? CHECK!

New user interactivity with social media and lots of clickable action items? CHECK!

Better useability with intuitive navigation and layout? CHECK!

New domain name? URRRRRHHH!!!

[that's the sound of a game show buzzer when you got the answer wrong]

You don’t want to get stuck in the Google sandbox

Lots of businesses don’t understand that changing your domain name, even after a year of having it online, is going to hurt - both your favorability with the search engines and with your visitors.

Your customers and prospects don’t want to remember a new domain name - heck, it’s hard enough to get them to recall the old domain when they hear it via word-of-mouth.

And Google doesn’t like newbie domain names; the goliath search engine sticks fledgling websites in what we in the SEO biz call “the sandbox.” You have to play there, with other infant sites, for six months or more - until Google deems you as worthy enough to rank.

The major search engines see a lot of shysters and fly-by-night operators in cyberspace they want to shut down for spamming practices. They don’t yet have a trust relationship with new sites.

So if you have an older domain name (the older the better) - rejoice! And don’t tinker with it. (Same goes for any web pages that rank well in search engine results; don’t mess with them, i.e. change headlines or metacontent.)

Permanent 301-Redirect a New Domain to Older, Trusted One

If you’re really stuck on a new domain name, make sure your webmaster does a permanent 301 redirect from it to your older domain. That way, you can use the new domain in your marketing material, but not bung up the value of your seasoned domain (ie. the Google juice it’s extracted over the years).

You plan to grow old gracefully - think the same strategy for your old, shopworn domain. It might be the best thing going for you right now when it comes to search engine placement.