"What's The Big Fuss About Long Domain Names?"Written by Alan Yap
The word is out. You can now register domain names of up to 67 characters. This is going to shoot your ranking way up on search engines. Because if you stuff all your keywords into your domain name, search engines are simply going to love your site. Or so they say...But is that really truth? No point speculating. Let's do a little test... Go to your favorite search engine, say AltaVista. Key in your search term, say "website promotion." Look at top 10 rankings, closely. How many of these top rankings actually have full term "website promotion" in their domains? No hype, just facts. Call me a natural sceptic if you want. When news hit town, with all "Special Announcements" flying everywhere, urging people to "go grab a new all-you-can- stuff keyword rich domain name and emerge tops in search engine ranking," I was not at all moved. I believe this is too simplistic an approach to getting high search engine placements: 1. Besides keywords in domain names, search engines look at a few other factors for relevancy. In fact, this is what Don Dodge, AltaVista's Director of Engineering said: "Keywords in domain name do not help much in ranking. We look at half a dozen factors in ranking. The words on page, their frequency and position on page, are still among most important factors." 2. Search engines are constantly evolving. Once they find out that such keyword-stuffed domain names are content-poor sites with low relevance, they are going to come up with new rules to preclude such sites from getting top spots.
| | Finding that Winning Combination...Written by Bill Quimby
A good domain name is valuable, but combination of a domain name and a good vanity 800 number can be priceless in marketing. The right 800 number allows your advertising to reach several times as many people that are not on internet regularly. It generates instant credibility and recognition and helps to create that all important million dollar brand name. But with incredible scarcity of both .COMS and 800 numbers, how could you ever come up that all important combination?All too often companies get one piece (like domain name) without considering other and then often run into also brick wall and have to settle for something less. The phone companies will often tell you that 877 is exactly same thing as 800. And that is true if you consider .CC or .TO same thing as .COM. They may be technically able to do same thing, but in their marketing potential they are totally different. So if you aren’t willing to settle for .CC for your domain, then don’t settle for same thing in your phone number since just like your domain name, that is how so many of your customers will find you. The first step is definitely most important and often one that gets skipped over way to quickly. Creativity is definitely key to finding either a domain name or a phone number. The good news is that it doesn’t cost any more money to be more creative. It just takes some brain power and a little effort. I’ll outline process of getting number briefly but you’re really not ready until you have 50-100 or more possible names. So be prepared to really spend time in this part. The first step of brainstorming is to look for any type of keywords. Just put down everything possible you can come up with related to your company, your message, your product or service, your benefits or your customers and what they are looking for. Take a look at keywords from your website or those of your competitors. Carry list with you for several days, and involve as many people as you can. If there are other people in your organization consider having a contest to see who can come up with most possible names/words. Short words are good because they allow you to combine them with a number of other prefixes or suffixes. Next use some of these mechanical brainstorming exercises and sites which will help you come up with possibilities you may not have thought of. Start with an excellent online thesaurus tool at Plumb Design (http://www.PlumbDesign.com). Next, after you’ve added any possible synonyms, take a look at what other people have done to get ideas at Whois.net (http://www.whois.net). Look at registered and perhaps better, recently unregistered domain names there. Finally use an interesting java search term suggestion tool available (click on option number one) at GoTo.com (http://www.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/othertools.jhtml) Try these tools with each of words that you come up with and you will literally get dozens of additional possible names. You can also try a neat tool for creating new words at a site for inventing new words called, NetSubstance (http://www.netsubstance.com) Then finally, you should combine as many of these names together with my list of possible prefixes and suffixes at http://www.TollFreeNumbers.com/finding.htm to stretch your list even further.
|
