INDIANA JONES AND CHOOSING DOMAIN NAMES

Transcription

1 INDIANA JONES AND CHOOSING DOMAIN NAMES In the Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, the villain chooses which cup is the Cup of the Covenant. He drinks from the cup of his choice, a golden chalice covered in jewels, then ages incredibly fast in seconds, dies grotesquely, turns into dust on the floor. The knight observes, He chose poorly. Choosing domain names poorly won t turn you to dust, but you can benefit from certain choices. You can protect your trademark and/or business name, enhance your search engine ranking, and make it easier for people to remember your website address. Making the right choices gets more challenging every day. Thousands of domain names get purchased daily. Domain name re-sellers watch like vultures for domains to expire and sometimes the expirations are unintended. Then the re-sellers swoop in, buy them up and offer to sell them back to you at ten times the price. A few of the tips here cause conflicts. For example, on the one hand it s great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to have key search words in your domain name. However, it s also true that changing the primary domain name on a website with a high search engine ranking can damage that ranking, even if all three key words are in a new domain name. So choose well, and use common sense. 1. Learn the Lingo Primary Domain You can use more than one domain name. Your primary domain is the one that your website resolves to the domain that shows up in the address bar when the site opens. A secondary domain can and should be forwarded to your primary domain, unless you are planning on using secondary domains as alternative landing pages. Top-Level Domains (TLDs) Top-Level-Domains include the familiar.com,.org and.net along with.biz,.co and even domains identifying a country of origin, e.g..uk for the United Kingdom.

2 Sub-Domains A sub-domain is just that, a subordinate domain that s based on a primary domain. Suppose the primary is XYZCorporation.com. A subdomain focusing on employment could be: jobs.xyzcorporation.com Registrar A registrar is a company who has acquired the right to sell domain names. There are thousands of registrars in the world. 2. Make Dot.Com your first choice. Unless you are a nonprofit, stick with.com as your primary domain. If you try to use.net, you run the risk of people automatically typing in.com and winding up at someone else s website. If you are a nonprofit, buy the.com version of your domain name and use it to forward people to your.org address. See the comment above about people typing.com automatically. 3. Protect Your Brand and/or Your Name: Buy.org and.net If they are available, own both the.org and.net versions of your website. If you can afford it, buy up the.co (yes, this one is just missing an m ),.biz and.info versions as well. That way you prevent competitors from trespassing on your space, or worse. 4. Acronyms Save Space on Business Cards, but Be Careful If you are convinced that the target audiences you care about know you as ICHR (for short), then sure, it s great to have ICHR.com as a short domain name. That fits well on a business card. But if you think that people will search for you using the phrase International Consulting in Human Relations, then you just figured out what your primary domain name should be. 5. No Worries Domain Names Are Not Case Sensitive

3 Domain names are not case sensitive (neither are addresses). Use caps to make your domain easier to read and match your logo and legal name, e.g. NetOutcomes.com. 6. Watch Out for Unintended Meanings You may be thinking that your organizational name, Experts Exchange, will make a great domain name. However, someone might see that domain like this: ExpertSexChange.com. Get a second opinion and use common sense. 7. Buy Your Name as a Domain If you re self-employed or your name s a part of the business, then protect your personal brand by buying the domain firstandlastname.com. If you type DaveTedlock.com into the address bar on your browser, you ll go to NetOutcomes.com. There may be a people named Dave Tedlock in the U.S.A., but only one of them owns DaveTedlock.com. 8. Long-term Expiration Dates Improve Search Engine Ranking Dozens and dozens of factors determine a website s search engine ranking, and one of them is the expiration date of the domain name. If you re not a fly-by-night firm and you can afford it, renew your primary domain for at least 10 years right now. Long-term renewals also save you money; a ten-year renewal can cost you $10, or less, per year. $100 for better SEO, not to mention an accidental non-renewal headache, is worth the money. 9. Ignore Renewal Scams Chances are you ve already received and postal mail scams telling you that your domain name is expiring now and you must renew. One client of ours received a redwhite-and-blue, official-looking document announcing an imminent expiration when in fact the renewal date was three years away. The scam includes not only a lie about the expiration date but also a huge hidden fee when you want to transfer that domain name to a reputable registrar. 10. Keep a Hard Copy Record of Your Domain Names

4 One way to deal with expiration notices is to keep a one-page document that lists your domain names, their expiration dates and the registrar. That way you ll have your own, independent source for fact checking. 11. Domain Names Should be Registered through Your Own Organization If you let them, some website developers/technology firms will register your domain names in their name, so they own them. You wouldn t let them buy a house or a car with your money and then put the title in their name, so don t let them do that with a domain name. Bottom-line, people want to own your domain name for their own financial reasons. One reason is that the vendor may have a wholesale account in which the hundreds of domains in it cost the vendor $5 a year while you re charged $35. Another reason is control: domain names are sometimes held hostage over a billing dispute. One hostage crisis NetOutcomes successfully resolved required us to track down a developer who had moved twice and then persuade him to accept a substantial cash payment so that the company could go back to using its own name again. 12. Use a valid address in your Registration Your registrar will you when your domain name needs to be renewed. If the originally provided is no longer valid, you ll never get the reminder notices. We ve been called by quite a few organizations who can t understand why their website is down and their quit working they just didn t realize they had let their domain name expire. 13. Transferring Registration to a Cheaper Registrar May Cost You Money When you buy a domain name from any registrar, you are required to agree to terms which sometimes include a transfer fee if you decide to change registrars. The fee may be equal to two or three year s worth of annual registrations. 14. Bate and Switch Lives Here

5 Some registrars acquire new customers by offering you a free year when you buy or transfer your domain name to them. These registrars get their revenue back by charging you huge renewal fees, or huge transfer fees if you don t renew. 15. Private Registration might mean you don t own your domain name Registrars are required to provide public records of anyone who registers a domain name. Whomever is listed in the whois record of your domain name owns that domain. If you pay for a private domain registration, which lists a third party on the registration, you may not be the legal owner of your domain name.