Buying a web domain
So you’ve decided to build a website, you have your product or company that you are trying to promote, or perhaps it is even just an idea that you are trying to share. You have an idea of the design, perhaps you’ve even started to build the actual website itself. Everything is on its way, and you are now at the stage where you are about to buy a domain name and get some hosting in. Stop! There are some important things to think about when choosing your domain name.
Branding is the first and most obvious one. Whatever your product, your brand should reflect this – and not always in an obvious way. If for example you are hoping to appear in the search engines for the term corporate events london, having the website corporateeventslondon.com will certainly make link building easier, so perhaps this seems the obvious choice However, when people click on search results they will have a quick glance at the web address. To many peoples eyes, having the words “corporate events London” jammed together appears spammy, and therefore it may well put people off from picking it as a search result. However, if you have a company name as your domain name, you seem more established. The choice is yours, but it is worth thinking about when choosing.
History is another thing worth thinking about. When you start a new website on a new domain name, the website has no trust or history within the search engines. You are therefore starting an infant website, and as such you will take 7 months before being able to rank within the search engines for the search terms you would like to appear for. However, if you were to start with a website that is already running, you wouldn’t have to wait seven months before being able to rank within the search engines. So how do you do this? Well there are two choices.
The first choice is to find a website that is already running and buy it from the owner. This can be quite expensive, but is fairly foolproof. You can see exactly where they rank in the search engines, and what you are getting. So for example, if you were a cosmetic clinic and you make your money from things like a face lift, you could search for that and then buy one of the sites from someone. This, as I said, can get quite expensive however. The other option is to buy a domain name that has expired. What this means is that if it is a good one, it will already have inbound links coming into it, and if it is fresh it will still have trust within the search engines. This is much cheaper than buying a website from someone else, however you are more restricted in terms of the actual domain name. Rather than pick one that you want, you have to take whatever is going, and sometimes this can lead to having a very inappropriate domain name! However, this is a tried and tested way of getting a domain that will definitely rank well quickly at an economical price.