People often ask various things when registering domain names. So I’ve decided to share my thoughts, right or wrong, it’s what I think.
1. Decide on Brand or SEO
All though this is a somewhat obvious one, I think it still needs to be discussed. Let’s use the spoon example. Do I choose the domain, spoons.co.uk or spnworld.co.uk – In this example we are assuming they are available, so don’t be a idiot and comment about it… Ok, spoons.co.uk has the word spoons in it, which does help in SEO, however, from a brand perspective, spoons.co.uk doesn’t sound that great really. Hence you can make you want to go for something like spnworld.co.uk, which sounds a bit more gimmicy and memorable. Ok the thing to remember, is you can have SEO on a brand, and also these days domains even like spoons.co.uk do not rank as well as they used to, search engines are more clever now. So I suggest you choose a brand name & seo the pages as best you can.
2. Getting all the variants of your domain, eg, .co.uk, .com, .net and so on.
I’d say, if they are available, then get them, they’re relatively inexpensive. But if they are not, don’t sweat it too much, most people will use a search engine to get to you, even if they have been to your website before. If they go onto a variant, they will realise its not you usually and leave and find you. Don’t go spending huge amounts of money buying them from their owners if they are taken, and don’t let them know you are interested – if you do buy them, haggle them down ALOT, after all, its no good to anyone else.
3. Don’t Buy a domain name with hifens ‘-’ in
An example would be www.spoons-world.co.uk - people can often miss the ‘-’ or forget it. Unless you are working on an seo site, and your main aim is to get traffic quier, then the domain can weight in your favour, but for brand, it is a NO NO!
4. Don’t get addicted to buying domains, thinking they are worth lots of money
There are very few profitable domain brokers out there, and loads of people who believe they have a profitable domain – and I know many people who have got addicted to buying new domains! It’s an easy rut to get into, thinking lots of names are good, and worth money. Yes they may have some value, but they have to have some MORE value to someone else as they will usually just buy a variant instead. The best way to do it if you want to try, is to buy the domain and actually build a site on it. A site with page rank and traffic is more profitable.
5. Do Park Your Unused Domains
Either put your own company parking page on it, or use www.sedo.co.uk to park your domains, if anyone does stumble on it, you can get a bit of cash.
6. Forward your domains properly
Google and other search engines are still stupid, if you don’t forward your domains using a proper 301 redirect, or just standard forwarding. A lot of people use frame forwarding, which does not redirect correctly – It causes search engines to index pages for both the correct domain and the one forwarding, resulting in lots of duplicate content – fix it asap!
7. Do not mass link to your new domain
Do not go out there and paste it on hundreds of directorys and websites, it will look unnatural and may affect your website rankings, instead build your website slowly, and look at with as a 5 year project at least. Be patient and if you’re not, don’t bother registering your domain.
8. If someone offers you a lot of money for your unused domain, just take it, they are fools!
Not happend to me yet, but I know it does happen!
9. Don’t buy your domain from Godaddy
It’s the shitiest company in the world, just don’t bother, go to somewhere else and more reputable.
10. I can’t be arsed to write anymore
I’ve run out of steam, sorry…
Thanks from the Wuup Team
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