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Tip of the Day

Domain Name Goofs and Tips

There's a difference between a company name, a website name and domain name. Lucky you!

By Nora Firestone
5/2/2015
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Let's say your friend Joe just opened an East Coast pawn shop called Joe's Exchange. He deals in such items as old coins, musical instruments, electronics and jewelry, and he'd like to become known for his jewelry line.  Naturally, he needs to make people aware of his business and its location, hours, merchandise and other information, so he sets out to establish a website and associate some good third-party tools with it. Smart. (I'm a big fan of the do-it-yourself website plan, which is why I teach people how to do it successfully!) His first step is to register a domain name.

As I explain in my "Design, Build and Manage Your Own Website" presentations and workshops, a company name, a website name (also called a site title) and a domain name are three separate entities that work together. Here's a brief overview:
  • A company name exists with or without a website and gets registered with government agencies; it's simply the name under which the company does business. These have existed for long before the Internet arrived on the scene.
  • The website itself, however, is a separate entity from the domain name even though they both pertain to and facilitate the company's online activity. If you think of this simplistically in terms of telephones, your website is like the phone itself, and your domain name is like the phone number that people dial to reach your phone. Or speaking in terms of physical property: Your website is like a building and your domain name is like the street address that represents the property's global positioning system, or GPS, coordinates.

    A website might have a different name/title than the official company name or the domain name, and this website name/title doesn't get registered with any official agencies -- it just gets written into the code of the site and can be changed at any time. For instance, my company name is Step-by-Step Presentations LLC. My website name/title is Step by Step. Since the domain name www.stepbystep.com was not available back in 2011 (somebody else had already registered it), I needed to choose a different domain name to register. Because the site was to display information about my "Step-by-Step" instructional presentations, which is similar to what I named my company, I eventually registered the domain name www.stepbysteppresentations.com .

So back to Joe's situation: Joe's first inclination might be to see if his company name, Joe's Exchange, is available. So he conducts a search at a reputable domain registrar. (Since 2008, I have used and recommended Name.com; tell them I sent you!)

Hooray! It's available: www.joesexchange.com!

Uh, is Joe missing something?

Perhaps something like www.joesjewelryexchange.com would be a better choice, and for several reasons:
  1. Www.joesexchange.com obviously offers too much potential for misunderstanding and ambiguous branding in all of his marketing materials. He sells jewelry and second-hand items, not sex-change operations. It's a good thing he's catching this now; just imagine if he'd spent a fortune on banners, business cards, signage and brochures before noticing the issue!
  2. There's nothing in the name Joe's Exchange that specifically tells people what the company does. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing in signage and print and spoken messaging, especially in the local offline market, the use of what's called keywords is essential online because those are what search-engine bots take note of when bringing Web pages to the forefront in something called a search-engine results page, or SERP. A SERP is a list of websites with links and brief descriptions designed to connect people who are searching for specific products, services and information with the websites of companies that provide them. If I needed step-by-step DIY instruction for completing a kitchen makeover, I might type something like step by step kitchen makeover  into a browser bar or search box and get a SERP that looks like this workshop handout from 2012, which provides additional information about metadata and where Weebly website metadata appears in SERPs (I use a newer version now):
How HTML page titles, URLs, page descriptions and other metadata show up in search engine results pages SERPs
Copyright 2012/'13, Nora Firestone.
The sidebar information pertains to how Weebly website metadata, tags and URL paths appear in SERPs. The ways in which other website platforms operate may vary.
3.  Following that train of thought, you can see why a domain name like www.joesjewelryexchange.com would be more relevant than the original for people who are looking for jewelry. Search-engine bots will recognize the word jewelry and be more likely to "recommend" Joe's website to people.

With that said, this is not a thorough look at what the best alternative domain name might be for Joe. There are other things to consider, such as how prone a word might be to misspellings when people are typing them into search or browser bars (jewelry probably is). For more on domain name selection, see link #1 at the end of this post.
So there's a lot more to domain name selection and SEO than stated here, and a study of the image above will give you some additional insight. (My presentations, workshops, articles and forthcoming book, "The $10,000 Apostrophe," get much more in-depth.) Also see the links in the paragraphs above. For your convenience, I've listed a few additional articles I've written on these topics. Take a look if you're interested:
  1. Anyone who's relatively new to the domain name selection and registration process should click to read this article, for which I was interviewed at Domain Name Advice.
  2. Click here to learn more about the essentials of selecting and registering domain names and do-it-yourself website-building platforms.
  3. Here's one about "polishing up your website copy" with proper grammar, etc.
  4. Bonus: Want to know what bugs me? Read about one of my pet peeves here.
Any questions? Feel free to ask me here! And if you found this post of value, please share it!

You're amazing, now go be yourself,
~Nora

Author

Nora Firestone is a professional writer, news reporter, Weebly website designer and acquisitions editor for Koehler Books publishing company. Since 2012, she leads presentations and workshops on writing for business, media relations, DIY website design, home-improvement projects and more.

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