The 25 factors behind brilliant brand / domain names
Last night I calculated that I have spent somewhere in the region of three days brainstorming a domain name for a new web venture. It shouldn’t be this difficult, but it feels like it is something approaching rocket science!
There are two major reasons for this.
Firstly, there is a scarcity of ‘good’ domain names that are available. This typically reduces all of your obvious / immediate options, and leads you into a world of pain.
Secondly, and even more importantly, the domain name is also the brand name (or should be) and as such there are plenty of other considerations to factor in.
So what I’ve done, partly to restore some sanity to the situation (I’m still undecided on my final choices) is to create a checklist of factors that should be taken into account.
Econsultancy Site Migration and SEO Impact - the story so far
On 14 December 2008
we relaunched the Econsultancy.com site. This involved a subtle name change (“E-consultancy”
became “Econsultancy”), a new logo, a completely new look site with a new
directory structure, a new URL, on servers in a different country. We had to
migrate 10,000s of pages, deleted a load of old ones, and created 10,000s of
new ones.
The background to all this is explained in my interview about the new Econsultancy site – and question 9, about the SEO impact of this large change, is the subject of this post. What has happened to our previously excellent search rankings since the changeover?
PR tries to sell 'afterthebailout.com' on eBay for $1m
Kudos to Annie Jennings for trying, but something tells me that she’s not going to sell the domain name ‘AfterTheBailout.com’ for more than a million bucks.
Annie, who runs a New Jersey-based PR firm, has fired over two jaw-dropping press releases informing me that the "hottest domain name AfterTheBailout.com is on sale at eBay", with the minimum bid set to a staggering $1m.
Number of bids to date? Zero.
The Web Week in Review
While the launch of Google's Chrome web browser took up many of the headlines this week in the world of technology (and I had to include one story on the launch here), there was other interesting news.
Finding a domain name for your business via marketplaces
Are you looking for a great domain name for your business but can't find one?
It's a common experience due to the volume of domain names that have already been registered, especially .coms.
Ten Firefox add-ons for SEO
One benefit of using Firefox is that it has a community of third party developers designing some very useful (and free) add-ons for the browser's users.
We've taken a look at some SEO-related examples....
How the new TLDs could impact your search rankings
On 26th June, ICANN, the Internet domain authority, announced that a new format for domain names would be made available, ending the 25 year long reliance on established TLD (top level domains) such as .com and .uk
The change will enable brands to register their own name as a top level domain, so we may in future see domains such as http://autions.ebay or http://books.amazon. The move is long awaited, with ICANN petitioning to bring this into place since its inception in 1998.
Domain name tools for brainstormers
Choosing a domain name these days for a new web venture or microsite is an activity filed somewhere between painful and truly horrendous. So what tools can you use to minimise headaches and the time spent on finding a domain name?
Don't let Google decide how to describe your site
When scanning search results, the only things that users have to decide which one to click on is its position in the rankings, the text of the link and the snippet of text displayed.
You wouldn't let the Royal Mail decide on the text of a piece of direct marketing so why let Google decide what text to display on these critical three lines?
Six million .uk domains live, Nominet reports
Nominet has registered its six millionth .uk domain name, with the national country code attracting a growing number of domestic companies.
The registry said a YouGov survey of 2,324 internet users showed people were six times more likely to enter a .uk domain name than a .com address when using a search engine.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
