What’s a domain name?
A domain name is the address that you give to people when you want them to visit your web site. It is what customers will type into a browser to find you, and it is the very first thing they will see about your business, before they even see your home page, usually via a search engine.
(You’ll often hear people refer to a domain name, a URL, or a web address. they’re essentially the same thing, except a URL can be more specific than the domain and refer to a sub page of the domain. So for the purposes of simplicity, i’ll call them domain names. )
Getting the right domain name is important, however there are several factors which mean you shouldn’t just rush out to buy any old domain name, and in fact mean that you might buy several.
But first, lets consider things from a ‘brand’ perspective. If you have a name for your property, then that should form the domain name that you use to promote your business to individuals. I.e. if your gite is called la ferme du bois, then you probably want to buy www.lafermedubois.com. Only do so if you think the domain name is catchy, memorable, not too long, and critically the words don’t run into each other (or make a rude word when joined together, some beautiful examples here)
Buying multiple domain names
Note that i’ve put .com at the end, and not .co.uk, .fr, .de etc. Actually, my advice would be to go ahead and buy all of those variations. Why? Because with a .de domain name, your site is more likely to be found in google.de search results, which will open your site up to many more potential visitors. Try the same search on google.com, google.fr and google.de and you’ll see that the results vary, especially once you get past the top 3 or 4 results. (it’s also worth noting that having some local language copy in the page helps you to rank in national google searches. More on translations in a future post.)
Domain names don’t need to be expensive (more on that in a future post) and I believe this is a worthwhile investment. Also, consider if one of your competitors were to buy one of these country derivatives of your domain name and start directing the traffic to their own web site, not really something you’d want to have to fix after the event.
Domain names and SEO
Interestingly, Google and other search engines give a lot of consideration to domain names when deciding how to rank web sites for specific search terms. In fact, if your domain name contains the search terms you want to be found against, your site is more likely to rank highly for that search term. So lets say you want your site to rank highly in Google for the search term “Gites in the Dordogne”. You might decide to also buy the domain name www.french-gites-dordogne.com and .co.uk, and even www.franzosisch-gites-dordogne.de (or whatever the correct german is!) and so on.
Many people mistakenly believe that you can only have one domain name per web site, but that’s actually incorrect. There’s no limit to the number of domain names that can point at a web site (called domain forwarding). The real limiting factor will be whether the domain names you want are actually available. As many bigger sites are wise to this search engine optimising (SEO) trick, a lot of the really useful domain names have been bought up already, although with a bit of creativity and the right tools you can still find useful domains that will get you good rankings. Again, i’ll cover these tools in a future post.
In the example above, you’ll note that the domain contained hyphens between the words. This is one of the non-alphabetical characters allowed in domain names. Interestingly, there seems to be little difference from a search engine perspective whether the words are joined together (ie frenchgitesdordogne.com) or hypenated (ie. french-gites-dordogne.com) but hyphenated domains do tend to be more readily available (for aesthetic reasons) so try both and get which ever you can.
In general, i’d avoid hyphens for your ‘brand’ domain name, as it adds complexity to a domain name if you’re telling someone your web address, but if that’s all that’s available, again, go for it. In terms of your ‘search’ domains, just grab whatever is available as you’re only buying it for search purposes and not as a domain name you’re going to actively promote.
Additionally, you’ll note there’s no ‘in’ or ‘the’ in the domain name. You could include these if you want, but generally search engines tend to ignore smaller words such as these and concentrate on the chunkier descriptive words so i’m unconvinced of their use.
So, how many domains should you buy? If a domain name is costing you £5 per year, and each domain name results in an additional booking, then it’s probably money well spent. the best way to approach domain names is to focus on the really key domains first, track the results, and then grow from there. Your web stats package should be able to tell you which domain the visitors are coming in on, which in turn should allow you to estimate the return you’re getting on your investment.
Pop any questions you might have in the comments and i’ll do my best to answer them! Also, i’m interested to hear people’s experiences of buying domain names for a future post, so if you have any good / bad experiences or links you’d like to share, please drop me a line.
A bientot!
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[...] such in the list above (unless the domains are just for SEO purposes, see my previous article on choosing a domain name) as the other extensions, being less common, have the tendancy to confuse people a bit. I cover the [...]
[...] be found against, you might try buying and using a domain name with the search term in it, see my article on domain name strategies for more on that [...]