Your URL IS Important

Great information on how to make sure your website reaches it potential. Great reading.

Tony

Top 5 Ways to Ensure Your Domain Name is Effective

By Chris Crum -

If you don't feel like you're getting enough business from your website, evaluate your domain name before you go to all of the trouble and cost of marketing it. Maybe you've already gone to all of that trouble and spent a lot of money and can't figure out why it's just not working. If you do not have an effective domain name, you may be losing out on an unbelievable amount of web traffic. Think of your domain name as the main part of your website's signage. Keep the following concepts in mind and you won't have to rely as much on search engines for customers to get to you site.

1. Easy to Remember The most important thing you can do for your domain name (possibly your site) is to make it easy to remember. You want customers to be able to type it in their address bar without even thinking. Look at Amazon for example. Just think of how many people looking to buy books bypass Google or Yahoo and enter "amazon.com" directly into their browser's address bar. It is simple and easy to remember. Amazon.

2. Not Too Long Another great thing about Amazon that also makes it easy to remember is that it is short and sweet. If you make your domain too long, people may use search engines to find what they are looking for just out of laziness because they don't feel like typing in your long URL. It may seem like that is really lazy and most people wouldn't be put off by it so much, but people want what they are looking for instantly. They find any shortcuts helpful. If they turn to the search engine and you are ranked at the top, then fine. But when they use the search engines, they are also bringing up all of your competition in front of them.

3. Easy to spell There's nothing more annoying as a user than trying to find a website, but not being able to come up with the right spelling. So if this happens, the user can either keep tyring different spellings (which is a pain) or again, turn to the search engines. So why not eliminate any of this hassle and just make your domain simple and easy to spell?

4. Relevant to what you do Having a domain name that says something about what your business does, can be a good way to help people remember it. An example of this would be books.com. This domain happens to be owned by Barnes and Noble, one of the nation's largest booksellers. This is one concept that does not apply to Amazon's domain name, but they can get away with it because they have done so well at branding their name over the years, which is the last concept I will discuss. A company like Amazon that has many different areas of business may find this harder to achieve anyway.

5. Branding If you are going to have a domain name that isn't relevant to what your business does, you need to put a great deal of effort into branding it. Always including the domain name in ads is a good way to start. Branding a domain name can be more difficult when you are a small business, especially now that more and more businesses have Internet presences. You need to find a way to make yours stand out from the crowd.

The bottom line is that if you want people to go straight to your site when they get online, you need to make it easy for them to do so. The easiest way for them to find you is if they know your domain by heart and don't have to think about it. Take a look at yours. If you were a user, would you be able to easily get to it?