Domains - Most customers who look for a website want to remember
something that is associated with the product or service you are offering.
Unless you have a lot of money to spend on advertising like eBay or Amazon your
best bet is to choose a domain name that represents your products and services.
Use simple and easy to remember words that are spoken often by your customers.
For example, your eCommerce business might be selling racing bikes so consider
the domain names: racingbikes.com or roadracingbikes.com. Try to avoid names
like joesracingbikes.com or smithsracingbikes.com even if your company is
called that. We want to make sure your domain name is easy to remember and
captures the widest scope of customers.
Don't Be Fancy
Try to make sure you choose domain names with the correct spelling and
to use short hand words. I have seen some domain names like racingbiks.com or
rcingbikes.com. These are words we may know when we are sending a text via SMS
but when it comes to marketing your eCommerce business it is not worth
shortening your domain name for people to try to remember.
It's very common to see onlinebusiness.com get shortened to
onlinebiz.com, which is not very good for search engine optimization and other
keyword link strategies that I will discuss about.
Choosing Dot Com Or Another Extension?
According to Verisign, over 45% of total domain registrations have a
.com extension. Keep in mind that shoppers will more than likely remember a.COM
extension while shopping online and this will have an impact on how successful
your business will be. In any business I set up the first extension I look for
is a .com, which allows me to expand and market my business globally even if I
am not a business located in the United States.
Domain Name Friendly For Search Engines
You may have realised my emphasis on choosing a domain name that is
related to your products and services and also my encouragement to keep it
simple. The reason why I recommend you look at choosing a domain name related
to your products and services is to allow for search engines to easily find
your website. Having the right keywords that relate to your eCommerce business
in your domain name can play a vital role. For example if my domain name was
racingbikes.com and I went online to search for "racing bikes", more
than likely your website will come up at the top because it is the most
relevant to the key words searched. This has already conquered half of your
battle. If you had chosen rcingbikes.com, then you would be spending a great
amount of time and resources trying to optimize your website.
A question I get asked quite a
lot is what happens if the domain name I want for my eCommerce business is
taken? Since there are billions of websites on the Internet, it would be common
for single and double word domain names to be already taken. Though don't
sweat, because you can still create a domain name from other keywords in niche
markets. Let's take for example the keywords "racing bikes" again.
Since racingbikes.com is taken, let us dig further and choose a brand of bikes
you want to focus on. Shimano is a popular and reputable brand: so let us
choose shimanoracingbikes.com. You could repeat this with many other brands and
use that to create a lot of domain names that would be directed to your
website. Alternatively being more generic you can choose topracingbikes.com or
leadingracingbikes.com. Which ever keywords are dominate in your market, try to
find out which ones would be profitable for your Ecommerce Domain
and search to see if the domain name is available.
Checking If Your Domain Name Is Available
There are many domain name registers in the market but I don't
recommend you buy domain names from them as they don't provide good support.
How To Register Your Domain Name
The company that I use to register my domains is Namecheap and I can
highly recommend them. They are very affordable and provide 1 year of private
registration as of writing this. It also allows me to keep my business address
and phone details private at no additional cost. A lot of top Internet
marketers use them because they provide good support and also they refer any
spam complaints to the web host.
The process in registering your domain is a very simple process. Once
you have decided on a domain name, check to see if it is available and then
register it through Namecheap. Once that is completed, you will receive a
couple of notification emails with your registration certificate and you will
be the owner of the domain. In the next few posts I will explain to you how to
setup your hosting services and link them to your domain name.
Tyrone Shum is an internet marketer helping you enhance your internet
business through his weekly podcasts, tips and resources.
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