A killer web site needs a killer domain name. No
matter how great your site
is, telling visitors to go to http://www.slowcities.com/carpel/tunnel/from/typing/~helpme/index.html
doesn't do good things for your traffic.
Let's say your company is about Africian Tree
Frogs and is called AfriFrogs
Technologies.
Most people will get a URL of:
www.afrifrogs.com or www.aft.com
WRONG!!!
You will get thousands more visits from:
www.frogs.com or www.treefrogs.com
It's short, sweet and to the point. More
importantly, when John Smith surfs
it, he can tell a friend the URL instead of trying to remember that site about
Africian tree frogs.... what was the URL again?
Unfortunately, most one word URLs are taken, so
you have to be creative. THINK ABOUT IT!
Keep it
simple... keep it dot com
I have a friend who works with the Central Iowa
Tourism Group, and he was asking my advice on what kind of a domain name the
group should get for their new web site. He said the group had pretty much
settled on www.centraliowatourism.org for their domain name.
After a quick search at InterNIC, I told him the
group was a bunch of FOOLS! They could register www.iowatourism.com and get
thousands more visitors a month. Imagine, you're Joe User and you're looking for
information on Iowa tourism. You don't know where to look, so you type
IowaTourism into your browser and up pops the Central Iowa Tourism Group.
Frankly, I was amazed that not a single tourism company in Iowa had purchased it
yet.
They bought www.iowatourism.org and the .com
domain name is still sitting
there waiting for all those hits. (The advantage of .com is that most users
and most modern browsers ASSUME a site is under a .com domain name.
Just between
domains
If your site is already residing at an URL,
making sure your current visitors
can find you after the move is a top priority.
The first thing you can do is let your visitors
know you are moving, when the
move will happen, and what the new domain name will be. Tell them on the home
page. Tell them in your newsletter. Post it in your discussion area.
Next, if it's feasible, leave your old site where
it is but replace all the
pages with a "We have moved" page (i.e. all pages are the same, just
different
names).
All the pages should say you have moved to a new
domain name and have the
following meta tags:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="20;URL=http://www.whatever.com">
This automatically sends a visitor to your new
home page after 10 seconds. It
also tells search engine robots not to index the page but to follow it to your
new home page (some robots ignore this command). This way, your old pages stay
in the search engines a while still generating hit while you resubmit the new
domain names pages. My old pages are still sitting in Lycos (ranked on Page 1
for one of my keywords) redirecting people to my new domain name.
When a "has linked to me" site shows up
in your referrer logs with the old URL,
you should send them a short note thanking them for the link; telling them
what your site is about, recent changes or improvements; and ask them to take
a little time to change your URL to the new address. If you have the time, it
wouldn't hurt to search for linked sites in the search engines and proactively
send them a "we have moved" e-mail.
