[Show Transcript]
In this week’s lesson you’re going to gain greater insight into the importance of domain names and how choosing the right domain can greatly improve your chances of success when marketing any product or service online.
A domain name is your street address, the URL, the words that are typed into the address bar at the top of the page on your computer internet browser such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or MSN.
It’s also typically the first impression your potential customer gets of you and your business.
It’s the first impression your potential customer gets of you!
Your domain name is that important!
And more than that, choosing a great domain name not only instills confidence in your website visitor, but also greatly improves your chances of getting that visit to your website in the first place.
Here’s why: 70% of Internet users type keywords into their Internet browsers address bar to see what’s there. The traffic generated by these users’ accounts for 15 to 20% of Google and Yahoo’s ad revenue.
This means that you can gain a lot of free and highly qualified traffic to your site just by having a domain name that matches keywords to your product or service. For example, if you’re selling an e-book that relates to let’s say… how to clean your pet’s cage, and your keyword research tells you that people looking for information on that subject type “pet cage cleaning” into the search engine, then a great domain name for you to register for that website would logically be petcagecleaning.com.
Also, the search engines will love your website because it has the keywords that people are looking for right in the domain. This gives your domain name SEO – search engine optimization -
or in other words, WEIGHT. That means another website, possibly identical to yours in every other way, but with a domain name which is not as relevant to the content of the site, is not going to appear in the search engines as readily as the one with the relevant keywords in the domain name.
As far as doing that keyword research to find out what those keywords are for your particular needs, go to FreedomUniversity,com and look in the free resources section for our latest recommendations and tools.
If your ideal .com keyword name is already owned by someone else, see how cheaply you can buy it.
Depending on what you pay for the name, it may be the best investment in your project that you make.
Using the free whois tool at Freedom University you can type in a domain address and retrieve the contact information and find out whois the owner and get all their contact details. The best way to make contact is to simply pick up the phone, call the owner and ask if they’re willing to sell the name, and if so for how much.
So, if you can’t get your first choice of keywords with the.com extension, go back to the keyword tool and go down the list until you find one that is available to register, or wait until you can afford to purchase from the existing owner of the domain you really want.
While there is merit in other domain extensions besides .com, in most cases, I suggest you stick to the .com. It’s the most common extension and the one people think of first.
You should also stay away from using hyphens and numbers in the domain, as they cause confusion and extra explanation when the domain is being described verbally.
Choose a relatively short domain with as few letters and words as possible. The way there’s less chance of spelling errors on the part of your potential website visitor.
Look for a name that’s brandable, catchy and memorable.
And…you should also be very careful not to make the same mistakes these site owners made when choosing their domain name:
www.therapistfinder.com
www.pensiland.net
Make sure you register your domains at a reputable and well established Registrar where who offer fair pricing on domain names as well as extra free features such as domain forwarding and 24/7 phone support.
‘QUESTIONS FROM STUDENTS’
Our question today is from Riley G. Riley writes: “Dear Randy, I understand what you’re teaching about the importance of having a relevant keyword domain for a website. I already have products on websites, which are established and receiving a bit of traffic. Wishing I had your information earlier, I would have chosen a much better domain name — – is it too late?”
Riley, this is a good question and it’s never too late to improve your situation and raise the bar in anything and everything you do.
There are two ways you can go…
One, you can create a new, relevant keyword domain and link it to your existing site, or put your existing site on your new domain and point your old domain to the new one. Ideally, you’ll move the site to your new domain and re-establish its presence there.
You’ll want to consider whether there are back-links to your existing site so you don’t lose your current traffic and search engine rankings.
If you, or anyone watching now with the same question, don’t know what I mean by back links and don’t know how to move sites around, you may need to get someone to do this for you or learn how to do it yourself. None of this is very difficult; it just requires a little know-how and a bit of time.
If you don’t want to learn and do-it-yourself, then you can post the task at a site where outsourcers will bid to do the work for you.
Today you learned that your website can get free and highly targeted traffic, when you own the domain name that contains relevant keywords.
You also learned that it’s never too late to raise the bar and change an average domain name to a great one.
[End of Show Transcript]
