DomainTyper

DomainTyper's new design

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 09:51:00 +0100

As you have probably seen already, we have redesigned the interface of DomainTyper. It’s cleaner, better and faster!

We investigated what are the most used features on the site and we designed the interface according that.

The Country specific TLD section has been moved closer to the Com Net Org, and got a new easier to use add / remove functionality.

The Domain Name Generator now generates suggestions to the name you have typed. The Generator has been extended with lot of additional tech terms to generate more relevant domain names.

On the performance side, the search results are now served faster. We are continuously improving the performance to make sure it’s working as fast as you type.

In case you have any feedback, please email us at: mail@domaintyper.com

Domain Life-Cycle

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:29:00 +0200

Lots of people are asking about how the Domain lifecycle looks like, when can a domain be registered again after it expired. Here is a short description about the exact lifecycle defined by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

For simplicity, we assume that the domain name was registered on Jan 1, 2009.

Date	Event	Status
Jan 1, 2009	Domain registered.	ACTIVE/LOCKED
Mar 1, 2009	After 60 days, the domain can now be transferred to another registrar, if desired.	ACTIVE/LOCKED
Jan 1, 2010	The domain has expired; Your domain will go ON-HOLD, which means your website and email will no longer work; you can still renew your domain name for the regular price; you can no longer transfer the domain unless you renew first.	REGISTRAR-HOLD
Feb 9, 2010	After 19 days, the domain will be dropped, to get the domain back after this point you have to pay the redemption fee.	REDEMPTIONPERIOD
Mar 9, 2010	After 30 days, the domain can no longer be restored, the only way to get the domain back is to wait until it is dropped from the registry Of course anyone else can also register the domain at that time.	PENDINGDELETE
Mar 16, 2010	After 5 days, the domain is dropped from the central registry and can now be registered by anyone on first come first serve bases. If the domain is valuable or has lots of traffic it will be snapped up seconds after it has dropped.	-

Statuses:

ACTIVE
Immediately upon registration a domain name becomes ACTIVE, meaning that it is not available for registration.
It may take anywhere from 1 hour to 48 hours for the whois record to be updated for a newly registered domain. While registrations take a fraction of a second, updating the whois record usually requires some time.
Under most circumstances, a domain can be active for 1-10 years depending on the duration of the registration selected by the user.
During the ACTIVE state a domain name can be transfered from one registrar to another.
REGISTRAR-HOLD or CLIENTHOLD
Once a domain name expires, it will usually move to the REGISTRAR-HOLD or CLIENTHOLD status.
Although the domain has technically expired, the owner still has the opportunity to renew it for at least 30 days (usually).
Under rare circumstances, a domain will not enter the REGISTRAR-HOLD status and will be dropped 1-5 days from its expiration date.
Depending on the registrar, a domain name can remain in the REGISTRAR-HOLD status anywhere from 1-45 days, with 30 days being the average.
REDEMPTION PERIOD
Once a domain name leaves the REGISTRAR-HOLD status it goes into REDEMPTION PERIOD status.
Although the domain has technically expired and gone through REGISTRAR-HOLD status, the owner still has the opportunity to renew it for at least 10 days (usually).
Under rare circumstances, a domain will not enter the REDEMPTION PERIOD status and will be dropped immediately after being removed from REGISTRAR-HOLD.
Depending on the registrar, a domain name can remain in the REDEMPTION PERIOD status anywhere from 1-35 days, with 30 days being the average.
PENDING DELETE
Once a domain name leaves the REDEMPTION PERIOD status it goes into PENDING DELETE status.
Under most circumstances, a registrar will not allow for you to renew your domain name once it has reached PENDING DELETE status. There are some rare exceptions (and it also depends on the registrar).
Under rare circumstances, a domain will not enter the PENDING DELETE status and will be dropped immediately after being removed from REDEMPTION PERIOD.
A domain name will drop, and become available for registration six days after it changes status to PENDING DELETE. Under some circumstances, a domain name can drop in 5 days instead of 6.
PENDING DELETE RESTORABLE (.org domains)
A status of PENDING DELETE RESTORABLE means the name is in Redemption Grace Period for 30 days and can be renewed by the registrant.
PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE (.org domains)
A status of PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE means the domain name is in the Redemption Hold Period and will expire in 5 days.

If you want to keep your domain name, the best policy is to renew early. You do not lose any time by renewing early. For example, if the domain expires on Jan 1 2009, and you renew 1 month before that, the new expiration date is Jan 1 2010.

The chart above applies to COM & NET domains. Other domains have a similar lifecycle but the status names may be different.

Liberalization of Domain Name Extensions

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:30:37 +0200

If you are not aware of it, some time ago the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved a regulation that will enable companies from around the world to register their own top level domain extensions. Microsoft, for example, could register .microsoft or even .software. There is will be a costly fee involved with the process, but if you think that domains like .sex and .poker are also a possibility, you can imagine the buzz that the whole deal will generate.

Cornwallseo.com asked a number of industry experts and professionals to give their opinion, here is the list of their replies.

Mark Nunney

From where I search, www.hotels-london.co.uk is No.1 on Google for the search ‘hotels london’. This is partly because “hotels-london” is included in the text of many inbound links and Google’s algo likes this. If Google will also consider the domain extension as link text, eg .hotels, as in london.hotels, then $186,000 for some new gTLDs might seem cheap. What will .poker be worth? And does anyone fancy chipping in and buying .sex, if you know what I mean?

Mark Nunney, Website Marketing Company

Jeff Behrendt

The only clear winner of the proposed new TLDs is ICANN - at $185K per
application, that’s a gravy train they are going to want to ride for many
years.

Some large companies will get their own TLD, but I doubt that it will be
very many. Big companies are not in the business of changing people’s
internet habits, especially when their current habits work fine for big
companies.

There will probably be many who start their own TLD to sell the promise of
quick riches to gullible speculators. Most of these TLDs will fail but
there will likely be a few success stories.

It will be very difficult for new TLDs to succeed as they will be
competing against the weight of all companies who advertise with
established TLDs. If I were to bet which ones stand the best chance of
succeeding I’d say geo TLDs where there is a large population and active
local government support – such as .nyc.

Jeff Behrendt, Aviva Directory

Andrew Burnett

The liberalisation of domain extensions will, to my mind, cause early adopters and nay-sayers alike to soil their collective briefs. There will be a hullabaloo over companies and individuals who do register their own TLDs as well as those who don’t.

Ultimately companies who choose to promote their industries, as opposed to themselves, will be the winners. Registering .bank makes much more sense than registering .royalbankofscotland for exampl - whichever bank does this first will forever have an advantage within that TLD and as such within their industry!

Andrew Burnett, designbuildpromote.com

Dave Naylor

Plain stupid for most cases, from an SEO point of view with more localisation in the search engines how the hell are they going to GEO target them by IP well that don’t work so well at the moment, I can see a few possible uses from the Branding side like bmw :

5series.bmw
1series.bmw

or we will see a boom in things like .con or .itter

www.google.con
tw.itter

time will tell I guess

Dave - www.davidnaylor.co.uk

Brian Turner

Liberalisation of domain names has been a topic for a while, but you only have to look at the record of non-TLDs - .info, .biz, .tel, .mobi - to see that these have effectively been an abject failure in user terms. New domain names do not communicate trust and do not empower consumers - they merely act to cash in for registrars in my opinion.

Brands have to buy new domain extensions, opportunities try to find clever names with new extensions. After that, it’s a process of barrel scraping.

In the meantime, liberalisation will not kill the public perception that TLD’s such as .com and .co.uk are the most important, and won’t turn around the fact that if you cannot register a brand on a .com or .co.uk extension, you’ll normally be unable to build it, because you need the authority those extensions are already granted by users.

Overall, I think the internet is going through an experimentation phase - but I think most of the changes cater for a very small minority of technical users, and few new internet innovations over the past 5 years have developed into anything that caters for the mainstream and remains viable. There’s especially a danger continued changes to existing services will alienate users - you only have to look at the recent autosuggest and local changes on Google.co.uk to see how the user experience is being damaged through forced extension of features.

Web 2 is a complete joke - it’s the lauding of chatter - and the more new features are built into the internet, the more confusing and inaccessible the internet becomes overall for mainstream users, and the more niche and segmented existing internet audiences become.

The liberalisation of domain names simply extends the process in which the internet is moving away from user experience because of the confusion it will generate, and the lack of importance or value everyday internet users will be able to associate with them IMO.

Brian @ internetbusiness.co.uk

Rob Watts

“I think this presents a massive opportunity for savvy marketers. Brands will have to be on their guard too as squatters and non bonafide people try to exploit this to the max.

It will also be interesting to see how the search engines interpret these in the SERPs also, will a trainers.nike domain be more relevant than say a nike.trainers domain and how will brands get a hold on this minefield generally?

With keyword variants and combinations running into huge numbers, it’s easy to see the potentials. The opportunities for affiliate marketers can’t be understated either. A nice .brand or keyword domain may also have a significant visual advantage over established brands and traditional stronghold.

Whilst ICANN have probably given this some thought, I’d still expect to read about the odd dispute or two! ”

London SEO Rob Watts

Steve Russell

Tempest in a Teacup

As a professional “White Hat Domainer” — and more importantly, a domain investor and brand builder — I do have a few comments regarding the “liberalisation” of the Internet vis-à-vis ICANN’s proposal to offer an unlimited number of new TLDs (Top Level Domains) known in the trade as “extensions”.

Firstly, for those of us in the business, the issues discussed in the report prepared by Gandi are old news. That is not to say it isn’t an important document. For the lay person it is a well-crafted and I would say an essential resource. I plan to make it a permanent part of my resource list for ready reference, and may include it in my soon-to-be-launched series of resource websites.

Whilst the impetus behind ICANN’s decision to open a plethora of new TLD’s is novel, I don’t believe it will have the impact and financial return for which ICANN hopes. There is a very high cost barrier to entry that will be out of reach to most… the USD 185k registration fee. Moreover, what the lay person doesn’t understand is that this will require the registrant to operate a Registry for the TLD, with it’s concomitant running costs — not cheap.

In this liberal Internet, the new TLDs will add to consumer confusion and will almost certainly require the use of a search engine to locate the TLD. The typical end user isn’t going to know that Coca Cola has registered the .coke TLD and won’t know to make a “type-in” request via his or her address bar in their browser. Said another way, once the 185k has been spent, who is going to spend another 500k to promote the TLD to the public, to make it a cognitive process in the mind of the consumer? Yeah, Coca-Cola might, but I aint!

Many new releases of TLDs, both general (gTLD) and country-specific (ccTLD) have flopped, regardless of the large numbers of domain registrations touted by the registries.

For instance, I have gone to tremendous expense to register thousands of domains to protect my brand; but, I would not consider taking a new TLD in my brand. Rather, I will let another entrepreneur take the TLD, and if I feel it is of benefit I will register my brand in that TLD.

Unlike most domainers or domain investors, I have gone to the trouble of trademarking my brand, and I do protect it vigorously and do not shy away from a UDRP challenge as and when cyber-squatted. I can also say that the arbitration panelists have moved ever closer to protecting trademark holders, thereby closing the foolish loophole that currently exists in ICANN’s come-one-come-all domain registration policy.

I believe that it will take years for the liberalisation to occur, if it succeeds. Personally, I feel it is a non-starter created by ICANN to glean revenues and exploit the uninformed.

linkedin.com/in/reallycoolsteve

Michael Gray

In most cases opening the web up with more TLD’s is just going to create confusion for consumers, for example is NewYork.NewYork where I should look or NewYork.com. of course there’s never any guarantee that the .com is the best source for information but starting from zero it’s not a bad place to make your start. While all of the good omains where registered years ago and the secondary prices can in some cases be astronomical building a business on an second tier domain isn’t a good idea either, people are always going to check the .com version of your domain first.

The one exception is movies, I think movies should have their own TLD. Too often today you’ll see a movie come out and the name of the movie with a .com on the end is taken. Studios have gone the subdomain route or add “themove.com” onto the end neither of which is intuitive. However a .movie TLD should be regulated by a film industry to only movies of a certain level, not amatuer or film school students, similar to the way .travel is only open to travel agents or travel professionals.

Michael Gray, wolf-howl.com

Chris Garrett

People will still use search, I do not see that changing, and I very much doubt people will be guessing domain extensions like .apple or .microsoft for quite a while. These new extensions will be had for vanity purposes and new web services, but ordinary folks already are unclear on .info and .mobi so the dotcom will still be prized real estate. I do not think this will alter the perception of anything other than dotcom and your local country domain being the prized asset. Expect to see a land grab, and third tier domain prices dropping in the domaining space. I feel sorry for global brands who will now have even more extensions to protect, and phishing could also be a problem if a clever authentic looking extension is found to exploit.

Will you be snapping up .cornwall ? :) Who will be first to try to get .seo? :)

Chris Garret chrisg.com

Andy Boyd

The .com / .net / .org domain extensions are so fundamentally baked into the fabric of the web that I find it difficult to see when that will significantly change. They certainly aren’t about to keel over and die any time soon.

Having said that, ICANN’s liberalisation will create a lot of new opportunities, both positive and negative. One thing is for sure: big brands will need to broaden their domain acquisitions to protect their reputations from being undermined by yourbrand.sucks etc.

Andy Boyd, setfiremedia.com

Patrick Altoft

On the one hand I think the whole thing could lead to confusion and loads of people not understanding what your domain is (have you ever tried to explaining .uk.com as a domain over the phone?) but on the other hand I would quite like to register patrickaltoft.seo as a
domain.

Patrick Altoft, Blogstorm

Andrew Shotland

Just like de.licio.us showed us how to make the .us domain interesting, no doubt some new service will hit it big with a new gTLD. As usual I imagine we will see a lot of early innovation in this area from the porn industry as .lez and its ilk become ubiquitous.

Andrew Shotland
SEO, Local Search & Web Strategy Consulting
Read www.localseoguide.com for local search optimization tips & trends

Ruud Hein

“More than anything else the new name spaces and the cost to start them will provide opportunities for new ventures. Just like people by vanity domain names, people will want to buy vanity domain extensions. The price of those is likely not to come down too soon, which is where the opportunity for new ventures is created.

To give small to midsized companies as well as individuals or groups of individuals a chance to register a TLD extension will be one of the first services built around the liberalization.

That said, a huge amount of water still has to pass under the bridge as trust in these new domain extensions will initially be near absent and, after the first waves of low quality spamming such as seen with .info, then rapidly declining… Dot com will be with us for a long time.”

Ruud Hein, SEO consultant with Search Engine People, Toronto

Hugo Guzman

The liberalization of domain extensions is already grabbing the attention of Fortune 500 companies. One of our high profile clients recently looped us in on an internal memo amongst key mid to high-level executives.

The gist of the memo was concerning the importance of securing key branded extensions to ensure that they could continue to control their brand and protect it from potential squatters.

We recommended that they definitely secure all of their brand extensions but also suggested that .com would likely continue to be the gold standard for domain extensions. 15 years of mainstream internet sites ending in .com have made this extension a de facto standard of sorts (similar to the position of the gas and break pedals in an automobile).

Kevin Gibbons

To be honest I think it’s all a big money making scheme. For example, brands will feel that they need to secure .[company-name] and .[keyword] domains to ensure that no-one else can register these and potentially damage their online reputation.

I certainly don’t think this means the end of the .com. In my opinion, these website’s will not be trusted anywhere near as highly as .com/.net/.co.uk domains, especially in the short-term, and I wouldn’t recommend building a brand on a newly created TLD.

Domain names are very important when trying to build an online brand, so you don’t want your domain to be confused with the .com version if this is already secured. Rather than creating a new extension to grab a similar domain to what you are looking for, I would recommend trying to be more creative with the domain name you choose instead. Think digg.com, sphinn.com, stumbleupon.com or twitter.com which may not be natural choices at first. Then you can start building a brand instead of risking losing traffic to the original .com site.

Kevin Gibbons, www.seoptimise.com

Fresh Egg team

The Icaan liberalization does not necessarily seem geared towards the user.
I am cynic but I see a money-making exercise when I look at the information coming out, such as the $186,000 fee to create a custom domain extension.
You have to wonder why the offer is being offered in the coming year especially as there is still plenty of latitude in existing domain extensions such as .biz, .tv and .info. There were a number of elements we considered, including:

- Lockdown - If the BBC pays to create .bbc is it then their license or can others apply for a prefix of the domain
- Will the process precipitate the launch of a new breed of on-topic domain rich scraper sites being used for link building
- Is there any real benefit to a solicitors want xyx.solictors, when they may already have xyzsolicitors.com

Another example of where the system may play a part is in Geo Targeting.
Will Google recognize a city name within a domain extension such as .London as part of. Will this just lead to a scramble for domains such as plumbers.london or florists.london and what parameters are in place to prevent individuals and businesses snapping up domains they have no real claim for?

A further problem we can see happening is domains being typed incorrect; for example, I own domainname.com and I change this to domain.name, we can see users still adding the .com entity to the domain.

There are so many ways of looking at the liberalization of domain naming. I really have a split view, I can see pros and cons. I can also see clients becoming confused; smart agencies should be communicating with clients and appraising whether the offering is appropriate to the longevity of their online projects.

On a wider notion I have always advocated the sex industry be restricted to using .xxx or .sex domain extensions. This would be easier to police from a Net filtration perspective on family computers, it would be great if Icaan were paying more attention to helping to protect web users as well as make money from them.

Freshegg.com

Ben Jesson

“Dot Com domains won’t decline; they are valuable because of their rarity—like diamonds or designer brands.

The new extensions may have their uses, but, in terms of prestige, they’ll be the fake Rolexes and cubic zirconia.”

from Conversion Rate Experts

Dharmesh Shah

Simply providing 14,000 new colors with which to paint the prison bars does not give us freedom. What we really need to work on is connecting as many as possible and letting information flow freely between them. We’re just not there yet, and this is another distraction.

Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot.com

Daniel Scocco

“I believe that the liberalization of domain extensions was a bad move by ICAAN. It will add a great deal of confusion on the web, as the end user won’t know what extension means what. If I am not wrong companies interested in having their own extension will need to pay over $100,000 in fees, and this could have been the motivation for the whole thing.

After a while, though, I believe people will head back to the established extensions. Inside the mess of .nyc, .porn, .microsoft and .toys, people will just type .com or .org, because they know those will work. Interestingly enough, the liberalization of top level extensions could strengthen the .com majesty.

And this point raises the following question: would a company be better off spending $100,000 to buy its own extension or spending the same $100,000 to buy a premium one-word domain with a .com extension?

I would take the latter any day.”

Blogging Tips

Chris Tew

“The change makes sense to me as it will allow many businesses and individuals to have the freedom to use a domain name that matches their company, without having to worry too much that it has already been taken as they could use a different but memorable variation like joesplumbing.usa. Unfortunately, as always, spammers and domain ’squatters’ will cause problems. Biggest problem is that they will use it to earn of other companies brand names and also use mis-spells like apple.xom. Despite the changes I still think that .com domains will remain most recognisable to consumers and therefore remain the most-sought after top level domain.”

Chris Tew, munchweb.com

Gareth Davies

Innovation and choice or a money making scheme? Either way registering your company name could be about to get a whole lot more expensive! There may be some obvious advantages on a local level to be able to register as a .nyc or .london and it’s possible to see how larger brands would welcome the opportunity to own their own top level domain (TLD).

However for the average SME the set up cost of $186,000 to register a bespoke TLD is totally prohibitive. I’d also question how many companies who have a well established, authoritative domain, currently in the form of a .com or .co.uk would be prepared to redirect their existing primary URL to a new bespoke TLD… especially when it could turn out to be a bit of a fad.

GSINC - SEO Company

7 Rules for Writing URLs

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:12:08 +0200

The structure of a Web site’s URLs can have a dramatic impact on crawlability, SEO, and user-friendliness. A good SEO already knows how to craft effective URLs, but web developers, IT staff, and management may not understand why the web address matters. In this article, I’ll share a list of best practices for choosing URLs and explain why they matter.

But before the list begins, here’s the first rule of URL Club: Do not change your URLs unless they’re broken. If your web site is being crawled and indexed just fine by search engines, and/or if users are having no trouble clicking on your URLs despite them being long or ugly, don’t change things. The potential SEO boost is smaller than the potential risk that something will go wrong on your end, or on the search engines’ end. If you’re URLs are broken, however, here’s how to fix them.

How to Fix ‘Broken’ URLs

1. Keep URLs as short as possible.

Usability impact: According to several studies, people prefer short URLs. Searchers more likely to click a short URL. Google’s Maile Ohye wrote that a long URL “decreases [the] chances of [a] user selecting the listing” in the search engine result pages (SERPs). A Marketing Sherpa study confirms that users click more often on shorter URLs.

SEO impact: Weaker sites with few inbound links are unlikely to see spiders crawling deep content. Spiders may visit and revisit content closer to the root directory more often; these are pages with shorter URLs. Also, it stands to reason that other webmasters and bloggers will be more likely to link to pages with shorter URLs; as a publisher, I trust short URLs more than longer ones and tend to avoid linking to long URLs that I’m not sure will remain active forever.

2. Remove session IDs from URLs.

Crawlability impact: Spiders are less likely to crawl a URL with a session ID because there’s a strong likelihood the content is a copy of another URL. Long parameters can look like session IDS and should also be avoided.

3. Limit variables and parameters in URLs.

Crawlability impact: At conferences, Google’s Matt Cutts has said it’s best to limit the number of parameters in a URL to “2 or 3.” As described in the Google Webmaster Central article referenced above, URLs with too many parameters are likely candidates to be duplicates of other URLs, so spiders try to avoid crawling them.

Usability impact: As mentioned above, users prefer short URLs.

4. Use keywords in URLs.

SEO impact: Keywords in the URL help tell the spider what the page is about. A URL such as www.domain.com/green-widgets.html is obviously about green widgets, whereas a URL such as www.domain.com/product.php?ID=23476234 is not obviously about anything. Keywords in the URL are an additional signal to the spider.

Usability impact: As the Marketing Sherpa study (and many others, too) indicates, users prefer short, clear URLs that help them pre-determine what the page will be about before they click.

5. Use hyphens to separate keywords.

SEO impact: Spiders recognize hyphens as a space. Underscores and other symbols may not be recognized the same way. Matt Cutts recently explained in a video that hyphens are best when it comes to separating keywords.

Disclaimer: Don’t overdo it. A file name like electronic-green-widget-repair-store.html looks spammy and untrustworthy.

6. Fix your URL canonicalization.

To a search engine spider, www.domain.com and domain.com are not the same. Your web site should not be available at both addresses; choose one (the “canonical” domain) and use that 100% of the time. Make sure the secondary domain uses a 301 redirect to the primary domain.

BONUS TIP: Not sure which to choose, the www version or the non-www version? There are two main considerations:

1. Which domain gets the most inbound links?
2. Which domain would be easier to change on your own pages (i.e., internal links, references, etc.)?

For example: If you have a lot of inbound links pointing to domain.com, and it would be easy to switch your internal links and references from www.domain.com to domain.com, that should be what you do.

SEO impact: Choosing a primary domain will help avoid duplicate content. It will also help focus your inbound link “juice.” If your home page is available at both domain.com and www.domain.com, chances are good that both URLs are getting linked to, and your home page is not getting the full benefit of all those inbound links.

7. If changing URLs, use 301 redirects to point from the old URL to its new version.

If you absolutely must change your URLs, you can minimize the impact by using a 301 redirect from each old URL to the specific new URL that matches. Don’t 301 all your old URLs to your new home page; that’s not spider-friendly or user-friendly.

SEO impact: By using a 301 redirect, you are telling the spiders that the old URL has been permanently replaced by the new URL. The impact of this is that all of the inbound link “juice” will be passed from the old URL to the new one, giving it a better chance at replacing the old URL in the SERPs more cleanly.

Usability impact: The 301 redirect will also help your human visitors reach the appropriate new URL immediately.

Word of Warning, Repeated

A complete change of URL structure should never be taken lightly. I advise clients not to change URLs unless they’re completely broken. You can expect to suffer a short-term loss of search engine visibility when you change your URLs, even when changing them to more SEO-friendly versions. In the long run, you should regain your visibility and even exceed it if your URL structure is improved correctly. There’s no way to estimate how long this might take.

URL Examples

Here’s a quick look at sample URLs using the best practices explained above.

Okay: http://www.domain.com/Shopping/Categories/Apparel_Clothing/
Better: http://www.domain.com/shopping/clothing.html
Best: http://www.domain.com/clothing/

Bad: http://www.domain.com/?cat=3423&pid=45345345&sessID=325646VGHD36523746&ref=56756
Okay: http://www.domain.com/?cat=3423&pid=45345345
Better: http://www.domain.com/shopping/clothing.html
Best: http://www.domain.com/clothing/

By Matt McGee

Domain Name Tasting

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:04:00 +0200

A good domain name not only makes people more likely to visit a website, but it can also increase search engine rankings. This is because search engine bots index websites based on keywords found both in its content and domain name. Yet, how does a webmaster know if their domain name is going to be profitable? Usually most don’t until they put it into practice. Hence, there is the practice of domain name tasting.

What is domain name tasting? Domain name tasting is the process of registering a domain name and seeing how much traffic it brings to a website during whatever grace period the domain name registrar offers, (which is normally five days). If the domain name brings in a lot of visitors, the webmaster will keep it. Otherwise, they will cancel their registration and get a refund.

Does this sound interesting to you? Well, before you decide to do domain name tasting for your site, first consider the ethics of the practice. Domain name companies lose millions of dollars every year due to domain name tasting. While some may not feel sympathy for them, if domain name tasting continues without any legal restrictions, DNS enterprises may strike back by making their prices higher. Such a consequence would also hurt customers who intended on buying the domain name outright.

Another ethical dilemma involved with domain name tasting is the issue of good domain names not being eligible for more serious customers. Some may feel that in a system of free capitalistic enterprise, domain name testers have every right to access however many domain names they can. Yet, if they aren’t really going to buy them, why shouldn’t these domain names be available to individuals who may need them more? Many would argue it is better to sell a domain name to a company that is serious about using it as their brand than selling it to a person thinking they can use it to get quick traffic.

It is also important to keep in mind that a good domain name is not a sole indicator of whether or not a site is going to be successful. Domain name tasters are fooling themselves if they think their practice of domain tasting is what has brought about their success with website traffic. Granted, an expired domain name might have a little bit of traffic associated with it, but to get one that is of value, a person would have to pay hundreds maybe even thousands of dollars. Many domain name tasters wouldn’t have the funds for such a domain name, so they may instead deal with cheaper ones. And most of these cheaper ones probably do not have their own traffic stream.

Indeed, the type of website that gets a lot of traffic is one that has: a decent domain name, keyword-enriched content and lots of inbound links. Even if one doesn’t see anything ethically wrong with domain name tasting, doing it may not accurately reflect whether or not a domain name is valid. In fact, if a person does domain name tasting and their website did not have the other elements that make for proper traffic-building, they could potentially be throwing away a domain name that could be a gold mine in the future.

via Online Marketing Success

How a domain expires

Wed, 13 May 2009 19:10:07 +0200

Contrary to popular belief, domains do not expire when they say they do. If the owner of a domain does not renew by the expiration date of the domain, the domain goes into “expired” status. For 40 days, the domain is in a grace period where all services are shut off, but the domain owner may still renew the domain for a standard renewal fee. If a domain enters this period, it is a good first indicator that it may not be renewed, but since the owner can re-register without penalty, it can also just be a sign of laziness or procrastination.

After 40 days are up, the domain’s status changes to “redemption period”. During this phase, all WhoIs information begins disappearing, and more importantly, it now costs the owner an additional fee to re-activate and re-register the domain. The fee is currently around $100, depending on your registrar. When a domain enters its redemption period, it’s a good bet the owner has decided not to renew.

Finally, after the redemption period, the domain’s status will change to “locked” as it enters the deletion phase. The deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day between 11am and 2pm Pacific time, the name will officially drop from the ICANN database and will be available for registration by anybody.

The entire process ends exactly 75 days after the listed expiration date. For an even more detailed explanation, read the article Inside a Drop Catcher’s War Room.

Landing your domain

So if domains are available to the general public 75 days after they expire, how do you know your GoDaddy backorder isn’t one of many other backorders from other people using other services? The answer is, you don’t.

And thus begins the cloak-and-dagger game of “getting in on The Drop”.

“The Drop” is the unpredictable three hour period of time in which the domain is deleted from VeriSign’s database and released back into the ecosystem.

I briefly thought about trying to beat GoDaddy to the punch by manually registering my domain during the drop process, but I quickly found out that there are no fewer than three major services which specialize in pounding away on VeriSign’s servers during the drop period. With their considerable resources and my measly Powerbook, there was no way I could compete on their level.

So I decided to enlist the services of all three major domain snatching firms in hopes that a) one would grab my domain for me, and b) no one else would be competing against me.

The three services — Snapnames.com, Enom.com, and Pool.com — all operate in a similar manner. They use a network of registrars to hit the Verisign servers at frequent intervals (but not too frequent to get banned) and snatch as many requested names as possible. If you don’t get your name, you don’t pay. But that’s where the three services begin to differ.

Snapnames.com

Snapnames.com (the exclusive partner of Network Solutions) charges you $60 for your domain unless there are multiple suitors, at which point there is an open bid auction between suitors. Seems fair enough. Snapnames is a bit of a newcomer to the game, but with their Network Solutions affiliation, they are said to be improving their success rates.

Enom.com

Not wanting to chance it with only one company, I also enlisted Enom to snatch my domain for me. Enom had reportedly been improving their “Club Drop” service for a year or two and it was now considered one of the top three. Their fee was only $30 and they are based in my ‘hood (Seattle), so I was hoping they would be the company to successfully “work The Drop” for me.

Here’s where it starts to get sketchy though.

Enom claims that the higher your bid is (beyond the $30), the more “resources” they will dedicate to grabbing the domain. What the hell? How am I supposed to judge that? Does that mean you’re using one server now and will use 30 servers if I bid $40? Or does it mean that you’re using 30 now and will use 35 if I bid $1000?

Not knowing exactly what to do, I attempted to bid a couple of hundred dollars during the last day, but Enom required me to send them a fax to become a “verified bidder”. Since I was at home that day and only dinosaurs still have fax machines, I was unable to increase my bid. Oh well, I thought, if someone else on Enom bids higher, at least I’ll be able to participate in the auction.

Pool.com

Pool.com is the Scott Boras of domain name grabbing — the brilliant, yet conniving agent that players (domains) love and team owners (prospective domain buyers) hate. Pool plays off the power of the unknown in such a fiendishly clever way that you don’t know whether to hug them or kill them. Here’s how it works:

Pool is the #1 company around as far as number of servers and success rates go. You place your original bid for $60 and if Pool.com grabs your name for you, they send you an e-mail telling you they’ve been successful and that you’ve now entered “Phase 1″ of the two-phase auction system. This is the case whether or not you are the only bidder! Pool.com doesn’t even reveal how many bidders there are.

Then, in a Boras-like move of diabolical genius, Pool.com informs you that you have three days to place a new sealed bid. If the bid is either one of the top two bids or within 30% of the top bid, you move on to a one-day open bid auction (the “challenger” auction) for final control of the domain.

Grrrrreat.

So if I bid $100 and two people bid $140, I don’t even get to move on to the final auction! It’s all designed to get me to up my sealed bid… whether or not there are even any other bidders.

Note: One other thing I forgot to mention is that before the name dropped, I grabbed all .net, .org, and .info variants (all were available) in order to have more leverage over other buyers.

The chase is on

Right on time, 75 days after the domain expired, I got an e-mail from Pool.com telling me they’d secured my domain for me. Great. Of the four sources I used, Pool.com was the one I least wanted to deal with. But true to their claims, they ended up being the best agent of The Drop and had just gotten me one step closer to my domain. They had A-Rod and I was the Texas Rangers.

Unlike the Texas Rangers, however, I realized I could be bidding against myself and entered a sealed bid of $302. I chose that number because it seemed sufficiently high but not so high that I’d feel foolish if I was the only bidder. I added the extra two dollars on the end just to edge out any other people potentially deciding on $300 as their number.

The next three days were particularly stressful. I had no idea where I stood, and throughout this entire process, I’d always had the sneaking suspicion that the people at these companies are on the lookout themselves for valuable domains. In other words, if someone all of a sudden bids $1000 on a domain, will a domain company decide to snatch it up themselves or “shill bid” against you on it?

Finally the e-mail from Pool arrived and informed me that I had moved onto the Challenger Auction. There was one other bidder and they had upped their bid to $312 in order to beat me. Not too bad, but I had no idea how high that person was willing to go. I had to decide on a top bid (a la eBay’s proxy bidding) and a strategy for when to place it.

True to form, Pool.com’s auction system squeezes even more money out of you by making sure the auction doesn’t end if there’s a bid in the last five minutes. In that case, the auction time keeps extending by five minutes until there are no more bids.

I could try one of two things: Bid high and bid early in an attempt to scare off the other guy, or lull the other guy to sleep by doing nothing until the last 6 minutes. I chose the second method since the ending time was 8am on a Saturday… a time when many people are not in front of computers. I set four alarms for 7:45am Saturday morning, woke up on time, and placed my bid for $500 when the countdown clock hit 6 minutes.

The system immediately auto-upped the current bid to $369 and I was the leader. Six nervous minutes, fifty browser refreshes, and a thousand heartbeats later, my opponent was nowhere to be found and the domain was mine… ready for immediate transfer to Dreamhost, my hosting company of choice.

I’m still not quite sure whether the person on the other end was real (although I assume they were), but the bottom line is that by playing every possible angle, I now have an extremely valuable domain in my possession for the reasonable sum of $369. Not valuable because I want to sell it or anything; just valuable because I want it.

Thank you Pool.com. I love/hate you.

Lessons from The Drop

Hopefully this article helps you in your own quest for a domain that may be expiring. My best advice is that if your interest in a domain name is only lukewarm, go ahead and use a basic service like GoDaddy, but if you really don’t want to let one get away, you must enlist the services of the big three: Snapnames, Enom, and Pool. It’s anybody’s guess what the final price will be, but by getting all the best agents out there working for you, you ensure at least being in the game.

by Mike Industries

Who owns a domain name?

Wed, 06 May 2009 16:41:51 +0200

If you are looking for a Domain name that is already taken, and you want to know who owns it, you can check it in WHOIS (“who is”) databases.

The simpliest way to do it directly from Domaintyper is that you click on the ‘WHOIS’ link under the taken domain after you searched for it.

This takes you to a page where you can check all kind of information regarding the domain itself.

Normally the contact information of the individual owner is returned. However, some registrars offer “private registration”, in which case the contact information of the registrar is shown instead.

WHOIS record contains the following information:

The registrant information. Details of the person who registered the domain name including their postal and email addresses and phone number.
The contacts: Each domain name is associated with three contacts - Administrative, Billing and Technical. In most cases, all the three would belong to the same person (the registrant). Note: The technical contact might be of the company hosting the domain name.
The creation and expiration date of the domain name
The name servers associated with the domain name

Where Did Whois Come From?

When the Internet was young, a single organization handled all registrations and a centralized system easily provided information on domains, the people associated with them, and other information. When commercial third-parties began handling domain name registration, and InterNIC. the Internet Network Information Center was formed to take on the role of responsibility for the allocation of domain names and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, and the information during this period was available through internic.net, which was administered by Network Solutions, Inc. and AT&T. General Atomics had a brief part as well, but there contract was cancelled early.

This role with regard to generic top-level domains (gTLDS) then passed to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in 1999 and WHOIS came into being, able to handle a variety of TLDs. With the multiplication of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), WHOIS servers multiplied as well and it became an issue to choose the appropriate WHOIS server for the particular query one wished to make, although the process for gTLDs remains somewhat more straightforward. A prospective global system is being looked into by a committee formed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, which since 2004 has been laying out a new industry standard called CRISP (Cross Registry Information Service Protocol).

How to check WHOIS

There are several sites providing WHOIS information:

What do the domain extensions stand for?

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:52:00 +0200

A Domain Name has two parts, name and extension. While you can choose any name for your domain, you can choose the extensions from the pre-defined combination.
Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD) name.
Top level domain (TLD) can be categorized as generic top level domains (gTLD) and country code top level domains (ccTLD).

List of Top-Level Generic extensions (gTLD)

Generic	.biz · .com · .info · .name · .net · .org · .pro
Sponsored	.aero · .asia · .cat · .coop · .edu · .gov · .int · .jobs · .mil · .mobi · .museum · .tel · .travel
Infrastructure	.arpa
Deleted/retired	.nato
Reserved	.example · .invalid · .localhost · .test
Pseudo	.bitnet · .csnet · .local · .root · .uucp · .onion · .exit

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country (a sovereign state or a dependent territory). All ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.

List of Top-Level Generic extensions (gTLD)

A	B
.ac — Ascension Island*	.ba — Bosnia and Herzegovina
.ad — Andorra	.bb — Barbados
.ae — United Arab Emirates	.bd — Bangladesh
.af — Afghanistan	.be — Belgium*
.ag — Antigua and Barbuda*	.bf — Burkina Faso
.ai — Anguilla	.bg — Bulgaria
.al — Albania	.bh — Bahrain
.am — Armenia*	.bi — Burundi*
.an — Netherlands Antilles	.bj — Benin
.ao — Angola	.bl — Saint Barthélemy
.aq — Antarctica	.bm — Bermuda
.ar — Argentina	.bn — Brunei
.as — American Samoa*	.bo — Bolivia*
.at — Austria*	.br — Brazil*
.au — Australia	.bs — Bahamas*
.aw — Aruba	.bt — Bhutan
.ax — Åland Islands	.bv — Bouvet Island
.az — Azerbaijan	.bw — Botswana
	.by — Belarus
	.bz — Belize*

C	D
.cat — Catalonia	.de — Germany
.ca — Canada	.dj — Djibouti*
.cc — Cocos (Keeling) Islands*	.dk — Denmark*
.cd — Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly .zr — Zaire)*	.dm — Dominica
.cf — Central African Republic	.do — Dominican Republic
.cg — Republic of the Congo*	.dz — Algeria
.ch — Switzerland*
.ci — Côte d’Ivoire*	E
.ck — Cook Islands*	.ec — Ecuador*
.cl — Chile	.ee — Estonia
.cm — Cameroon	.eg — Egypt
.cn — People’s Republic of China*	.eh — Western Sahara
.co — Colombia	.er — Eritrea
.cr — Costa Rica	.es — Spain*
.cu — Cuba	.et — Ethiopia
.cv — Cape Verde	.eu — European Union
.cx — Christmas Island*
.cy — Cyprus	F
.cz — Czech Republic	.fi — Finland
	.fj — Fiji*
	.fk — Falkland Islands
	.fm — Federated States of Micronesia*
	.fo — Faroe Islands
	.fr — France

G	H
.ga — Gabon	.hk — Hong Kong*
.gb — United Kingdom	.hm — Heard Island and McDonald Islands*
.gd — Grenada*	.hn — Honduras*
.ge — Georgia	.hr — Croatia
.gf — French Guiana	.ht — Haiti
.gg — Guernsey	.hu — Hungary*
.gh — Ghana
.gi — Gibraltar	I
.gl — Greenland*	.id — Indonesia
.gm — Gambia	.ie — Ireland
.gn — Guinea	.il — Israel*
.gp — Guadeloupe	.im — Isle of Man*
.gq — Equatorial Guinea	.in — India*
.gr — Greece*	.io — British Indian Ocean Territory*
.gs — South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands*	.iq — Iraq
.gt — Guatemala	.ir — Iran*
.gu — Guam	.is — Iceland*
.gw — Guinea-Bissau	.it — Italy
.gy — Guyana

J	K
.je — Jersey	.ke — Kenya
.jm — Jamaica	.kg — Kyrgyzstan
.jo — Jordan	.kh — Cambodia
.jp — Japan	.ki — Kiribati
	.km — Comoros
	.kn — Saint Kitts and Nevis
	.kp — North Korea
	.kr — South Korea
	.kw — Kuwait
	.ky — Cayman Islands
	.kz — Kazakhstan*

L	M
.la — Laos*	.ma — Morocco
.lb — Lebanon	.mc — Monaco
.lc — Saint Lucia	.md — Moldova*
.li — Liechtenstein*	.me — Montenegro*
.lk — Sri Lanka	.mg — Madagascar
.lr — Liberia	.mh — Marshall Islands
.ls — Lesotho*	.mk — Republic of Macedonia
.lt — Lithuania	.ml — Mali
.lu — Luxembourg	.mm — Myanmar
.lv — Latvia*	.mn — Mongolia*
.ly — Libya*	.mo — Macau
	.mp — Northern Mariana Islands*
	.mq — Martinique
	.mr — Mauritania
	.ms — Montserrat*
	.mt — Malta
	.mu — Mauritius*
	.mv — Maldives
	.mw — Malawi*
	.mx — Mexico*
	.my — Malaysia
	.mz — Mozambique

N	O
.na — Namibia*	.om — Oman
.nc — New Caledonia
.ne — Niger	P
.nf — Norfolk Island*	.pa — Panama
.ng — Nigeria	.pe — Peru
.ni — Nicaragua	.pf — French Polynesia
.nl — Netherlands*	.pg — Papua New Guinea
.no — Norway	.ph — Philippines*
.np — Nepal	.pk — Pakistan*
.nr — Nauru*	.pl — Poland*
.nu — Niue*	.pm — Saint Pierre and Miquelon
.nz — New Zealand*	.pn — Pitcairn Islands*
	.pr — Puerto Rico*
	.ps — Palestine*
	.pt — Portugal*
	.pw — Palau
	.py — Paraguay

Q	R
.qa — Qatar	.re — Réunion
	.ro — Romania*
	.rs — Serbia*
	.ru — Russia*
	.rw — Rwanda

S	T
.sa — Saudi Arabia	.tc — Turks and Caicos Islands*
.sb — Solomon Islands*	.td — Chad
.sc — Seychelles*	.tf — French Southern Territories
.sd — Sudan	.tg — Togo*
.se — Sweden*	.th — Thailand*
.sg — Singapore	.tj — Tajikistan*
.sh — Saint Helena*	.tk — Tokelau*
.si — Slovenia	.tl — East Timor (formerly .tp)*
.sj — Svalbard and Jan Mayen islands	.tm — Turkmenistan*
.sk — Slovakia	.tn — Tunisia
.sl — Sierra Leone	.to — Tonga*
.sm — San Marino*	.tp — East Timor
.sn — Senegal	.tr — Turkey
.so — Somalia*	.tt — Trinidad and Tobago*
.sr — Suriname*	.tv — Tuvalu*
.st — São Tomé and Príncipe*	.tw — Taiwan*
.su — Soviet Union	.tz — Tanzania
.sv — El Salvador
.sy — Syria*
.sz — Swaziland*

U	V
.ua — Ukraine	.va — Vatican City
.ug — Uganda*	.vc — Saint Vincent and the Grenadines*
.uk — United Kingdom	.ve — Venezuela
.um — US Minor Outlying Islands (code terminated)	.vg — British Virgin Islands*
.us — United States*	.vi — United States Virgin Islands
.uy — Uruguay	.vn — Vietnam
.uz — Uzbekistan	.vu — Vanuatu*

W	Y
.wf — Wallis and Futuna	.ye — Yemen
.ws — Samoa*	.yt — Mayotte
	.yu — Yugoslavia

Z
.za — South Africa*
.zm — Zambia
.zw — Zimbabwe

* Foreign registration permitted

Six naming myths to ignore

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:48:17 +0200

When people face challenges they feel unprepared for, they want rules. They want experts to explain to them clearly and unequivocally what to do. And there’s usually no shortage of people willing to step into that expert role.

Naming is one challenge that many people find baffling, and naming rules abound in blogs, books, and magazine articles. The rules are often stated in uncompromising terms that make them easy to follow with minimal thought. Today The Name Inspector wants to talk about some of those rules and why they’re dumb.

1. Your domain name should have no more than six letters

Some rules are bad because they continue to be passed around after they become obsolete. The myth of the six-letter domain name is one of those rules. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how it got started, but he found something like it in writing. A Microsoft publication called Managing Your E-Commerce Business, Second Edition has the following guideline:

The perfect domain name is less than six letters long, followed by .com or some other suffix. Short domain names are easier to remember and type. However, let’s be realistic: Fewer and fewer one-word domain names are left with each passing hour.

That was written in 2001, but you’ll still find people talking about how domain names are ideally no more than six letters long. Sometimes they point to a bunch of prominent names like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc. as “proof” of this idea. But anyone who has tried to find a good domain name in the last five years or so knows that the six-letter limit is unrealistic. The five-letter limit urged in the passage above is now laughable. Some companies, like Biznik, do manage to find great six-letter domains, but they’re the lucky exceptions.

There’s some truth to the idea that short domain names are more memorable than long ones, but it’s not a matter of counting letters. The name ICanHasCheezBurger.com is far more memorable than the name jfhpnx.com, even though the former has eighteen letters and the latter has only six. Memorability depends on the units being remembered. Meaningful phrases are more memorable than random sequences of letters, for example.

While it’s true that there are several big names on the web that have six or fewer letters, there are plenty of popular sites that have longer domain names. The following sites are all in the Alexa Top 100: YouTube (7 letters), FaceBook (8 letters), Wikipedia (9 letters), Craigslist (10 letters), Photobucket (11 letters), and even Adultfriendfinder (17 letters). What these names have in common is that they consist of familiar parts put together (except Wikipedia, which was named before anyone knew what wiki meant).

So when you’re trying to come up with a domain name, you want to keep reasonably short, but you might also want to make it meaningful. If that’s your goal, don’t worry about arbitrary letter limits.

2. A name should be an empty vessel

You’ll hear a lot of marketing people say that a name should be an “empty vessel”. Hardly anyone gives a coherent explanation of the term, though. Here’s a statement taken from the website of Heckler Associates, the esteemed Seattle branding agency that came up with the name Starbucks:

Unique brand names serve as relevant ‘empty vessels,’ their meaning filled entirely by brand equity. Brand names that embrace market trends and conventions or associate too closely to common words signal a follower’s position. They reduce the opportunity for distinction, limit assimilation of your brand values, and make legal protection difficult.

The phrase “their meaning filled entirely by brand equity” implies that an empy vessel has no meaning. But what counts as meaning? Heckler came up with the name Cinnabon, which clearly resembles the phrase cinnamon bun. That’s not meaning? Do they mean the name doesn’t appear verbatim in the dictionary? If so, they should say that. The image of an empty vessel is a terrible way to get that point across. Cinnabon does not get all its meaning from brand equity. It gets most of its meaning from its resemblance to the phrase cinnamon bun. The first time The Name Inspector saw one of these places in an airport, he thought to himself, “Huh, I guess they sell cinnamon buns”. Cinnabon is about as descriptive as a name can be.

So it’s really unclear what marketing people are getting at when they talk about this empty vessel stuff. One thing they mean is that a name shouldn’t limit a company too strictly to one area of business, lest it make future diversification difficult. That’s a legitimate concern. But it has nothing to do with a name being devoid of meaning.

When you talk about the “meanings” of a name, you really have to consider two things. First there are meanings of the word(s) that the name is based on. Then there’s the way those meanings relate to the company, product, or service the name stands for. Some names based on real words, like Internation Business Machines, are essentially literal descriptions and can indeed be limiting. Other names based on real words, like Apple, evoke concepts that relate only imaginatively to what the names stand for. Two very different kinds of name, neither devoid of meaning.

So, there are three problems with the “empty vessel” idea: (1) no one explains clearly what it means, (2) actual naming practice doesn’t seem to follow the dictate of the empty vessel, and (3) this way of talking about meaning completely misses the crucial role of context.

Meaning is good. Meaning is your friend. You just have to use it imaginatively. Forget the empty vessel.

3. Your name should yield almost no results in Google

This rule is proposed by Seth Godin in his post The New Rules of Naming. It’s based entirely on the idea that customers will find a company’s website by typing the company’s name into a search engine. It is important to be findable in that way. But to be found on Google, what you really need is to be the first search result. The rest don’t matter for findability purposes. If you own yourcompanyname.com, then you’re already halfway there.

There’s another important way potential customers use web searches: to learn about the credibility and reputation of a company before becoming actual customers. If you search on a company’s name and their site doesn’t turn up as the first result, you might think the company lacks legitimacy. If the first several results aren’t web pages that mention the company, you might think the company is small potatoes. Godin’s rule will help a company avoid these situations. But it’s overkill to say a name should only yield a few results in Google before you start using it. What’s really important is that you be able to dominate the top ten or so results for a search on your name. Results after that will probably be ignored by web searchers. So what matters is not so much the number of results you get for a search on a potential name, but how much “Google juice” those results have to compete with you, should you decide to use the name.

Let’s amend Seth’s rule: It’s a good idea to choose a name that will allow you to dominate the first page of search results on Google (and other search engines, of course). That means not having too much competition from popular websites.

4. Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet

Guy Kawasaki promotes this rule in his book The Art of the Start. It’s a pretty old-school rule, based on the idea that you want to appear early in alphabetical listings like the phone book or a list of conference vendors. Again, the validity of this rule really depends on the situation. How much of your business do you expect to get from the phone book or from conference attendees? How much do you expect to get from web search, word-of-mouth, and advertising? If you’re relying more on the latter, message and memorability are way more important than what letter your name starts with.

5. Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s) __.

Experts often tell you that your name should ideally start with or contain a certain letter.

From the website of KaZaK Composites:

While visiting Sony in Japan, Dr. Fanucci [that’s the founder] attended a presentation on the principles of choosing a good corporate name. There he learned what makes a good company name, including that it should include the letters k, z and x.

Who was that mysterious “expert” giving bogus naming advice in Japan?

The branding professionals at Shift Partners suggest that a company name should begin with the letter V.

Now, The Name Inspector is obviously in favor of being sensitive to the nuances of words, sounds, and even letters. But people, there are no magic letters. Worry about things that matter first, like whether your name evokes ideas that help your brand.

6. Names of such-and-such a type are bad

The company Brains on Fire sometimes advertises itself this way in Google search ads:

No Latin roots. No mashed together words. Names that mean something.

The Name Inspector has already made it pretty clear that he loves meaning, so he doesn’t object to that last sentence. It’s the first two that are puzzling. Surely the folks at Brains on Fire don’t actually avoid using any words based on Latin in their names. They’re probably talking about avoiding a certain naming style that was popular in the 1990s–the one that gave us names like Acura Integra. Fair enough. But no mashed together words? Does that mean no blends, like Viralmentalist or Fiskateers? Wait, those names came out of Brains On Fire projects. Do they mean no compounds, like IndieBound? Oh, that’s a name they came up with. So what does their ad mean, exactly?

Linguistically speaking, there are only so many ways to create a name. The Name Inspector can’t understand why anyone would want to take perfectly serviceable types of name off the table. It’s already hard enough to come up with a good, meaningful name.

The bottom line: when naming, you can follow simple rules that will get you nowhere, or you can do the hard work of using language creatively to help people see your company, product, or service in the best and most interesting way.

via The Name inspector

The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:16:00 +0200

Naming is linguistic design, and a good domain name is an important part of the overall design of a website. A name plays a prominent role when people discover, remember, think about, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time.

Coming up with a good domain name requires a combination of strategy, imagination and good linguistic design practice.

You’ll find some basic pieces of advice all over the Web, and it’s worth mentioning those right away. Ideally, your domain name should be:

Short
Catchy and memorable,
Easy to pronounce,
Easy to spell,
Not too similar to competing domain names,
Not a violation of someone else’s trademark.

These are all good rules of thumb. But they lack specifics. These are really criteria to use to evaluate ideas for names after you’ve thought of them. To come up with a name in the first place, you need to know what type of name is best for you. And before you can answer that question, you have to answer two others: one about your resources, and the other about your Web strategy.

Two Questions

The first question is easy: Are you willing and able to spend lots of money on your domain name? If not, you can forget about a .com domain that’s a single real word, like Twitter.com or Amazon.com. They’re all registered, many by domain speculators, and buying one will cost a lot. You’ll need to look for a different kind of name. Real words on .net and .org domains are pretty hard to come by, too.

The other question is a strategic one and takes more thought: How do you plan to get traffic to your website? Answering this question can help you avoid a lot of confusion about what makes for a good name. Some views on this issue directly contradict others. For example, Rob Monster, CEO of Monster Venture Partners, believes that Google.com and Yahoo.com are “lousy domain names” and that podcast.com and slideshow.com are great ones. Marketing guru Seth Godin advises against real words like these and in favor of unique made-up names like Squidoo.com (his company).

So, what’s going on here? These two views correspond to different strategies for getting Web traffic. Monster is interested in what we might call a “discoverable” domain name. That’s a name that can be found by someone who doesn’t know about your website but is doing web searches on keywords and phrases related to a specific topic, or by typing those words and phrases directly into the navigation bar of the browser. Discoverable names are generically descriptive.

The type of name that Godin is talking about is a “brandable” domain name. A brandable name establishes a distinct identity and communicates indirectly to evoke interesting ideas and feelings. Some brandable names, like Squidoo, provide a unique character string unlikely to be found anywhere except in documents that mention that particular website. That means people who know the name of the website can easily use a search engine to navigate there. Godin makes good use of this advantage, though it may not be a significant source of traffic. A unique character string also makes it possible for mentions of your website to dominate top search results for your name. That helps establish credibility, which may be considerably more important.

Discoverable Or Brandable?

So, do you need a discoverable name or a brandable name? If you intend to rely primarily on organic search results for a specific topic, you might want a discoverable name… but not necessarily. Even if your website has a brandable name, it can still rank well in search engine results for keywords and phrases as long as it’s full of relevant content. Discoverable names are only necessary for people counting on “type-in” traffic.

Domains Bot, a search engine that is geared specifically towards finding a domain name. It works best if you’re looking for a compound-word domain rather than an invented word.

Discoverable names are real words and phrases. If you don’t have the budget to buy a single real-word domain, then you’ll need to go for a phrase. Common phrases are often registered as well, so it can take time to find one. The trick to a discoverable name is not to be clever but to think of a phrase that other people would likely think of as well and would type in a search engine or navigation bar. The catch is that you have to find one that hasn’t yet been registered. DomainTyper.com is a great tool for checking the availability of domain names and suggest available alternative names.

If your marketing plans involve paid search listings and buzz generated by prominent mentions of your website, then you will almost certainly want a brandable name. A brandable name is distinctive, evocative and memorable.

Strategies For Brandable Names

So how do you come up with a brandable name? It takes some creativity. You sometimes hear people, including marketing people, say that a name should be an “empty vessel,” so that it can get all its meaning from other forms of branding. That’s not the most productive way to think when coming up with a name. Most great website names are connected to the purpose of the website in an indirect and interesting way. Often they use sensory images or tap into people’s personal experience in some way.

Some names are metaphors. PageFlakes, for example, uses the unexpected flake metaphor to help people understand something about how to use the website: you drag little boxes of content around, and they stick in the places you drop them, like flakes. Smashing Magazine is based on a word used in an enthusiastic appraisal of a performance, outfit, or design — “That looks smashing!” — but it also evokes the idea of being physically clobbered. That metaphor is brought to the foreground by the tagline: “We smash you with the information that makes your life easier. Really.”

Image credit: eBoy.

How do you come up with a metaphor? First, you have to have a clear understanding of what makes your website special and interesting. Then you have to find a simpler concept that helps people understand that concept by analogy, usually by imagined sensory experiences. The sensory information used in metaphors makes them vivid and memorable. There’s no algorithm for finding a metaphor, but it often involves thinking visually, which should come naturally to Web designers.

Some names have indirect connections to a website’s purpose but not through a metaphor. Flickr.com, for example, relates to photography through the concept of light that’s implicit in the word “flicker.”

Putting Names Together

Because you won’t be looking for a single-word name (unless you have big bucks to spend), you’ll have to build your name out of pieces. There are several different ways to do that:

Compound
Example: YouTube
Two whole words, often two nouns, stuck together. Don’t let anyone tell you that this kind of name is a “fad” and will go away. This has been the most common way to coin new English words as well as to create new names, and that’s unlikely to change in the next few hundred years.
Phrase
Example: Six Apart
Words put together according to normal grammatical rules. Phrase names can be similar to compounds, but have a different pattern of syllabic emphasis. In compounds, the emphasis goes on the first word, the way we emphasize “white” in “the Whitehouse.” In phrases, the emphasis often goes on the second word, the way we emphasize “house” in “a white house.”
Blend
Examples: Microsoft, Farecast
A blend combines a part of a word with another word or word part. The name Microsoft combines the “micro” part of “microcomputer” with the “soft” part of “software.” When blends involve a surprising overlap in sound between the two words, they’re a form of wordplay. Farecast is like that. It combines the words “fare” and “forecast,” and “fare” resembles the first syllable of “forecast.” When you create this kind of blend, be sure to avoid awkwordplay: don’t pile up consonants in ugly ways (like in the name Syncplicity), and don’t use important words to replace syllables that aren’t emphasized (the way the names Mapufacture and Carticipate do).
Tweaked word
Examples: Flickr, Zune
Sometimes you can find a good domain name that’s basically a real word, but changed in some small way. It might have a modified spelling, like Flickr, or it might have a changed or added sound, like Zune (from “tune”) and iPhone.
Affixed word
Example: Friendster
Some names are new words created by sticking a prefix or suffix onto an existing word. Friendster, for example, is “friend” with the suffix -ster attached. Biznik is “biz” with the Yiddish-derived suffix -nik (as in “beatnik”).
Made-up name
Examples: Etsy, Odeo
Sometimes you can find a name that is, or seems to be, completely made up. For example, Etsy is an online hand-made goods marketplace, and Odeo is an online music website.

When building a name out of pieces, be sure that both pieces contribute something interesting. The name LibraryThing fails in this respect. LiftPort, the name of a company that wants to build an elevator to outer space, is not much better. The words “lift” and “port” have very similar meanings; both relate to moving things around. Neither relates to what makes this company really exciting, outer space.

Linguistic Design Guidelines

Here are some general guidelines on linguistic design that you can use in your quest for a name:

Meaning

Be specific:

Good: 37signals
Bad: LibraryThing

Appeal to the senses in appropriate ways:

Good: Twitter
Bad: BookGoo

Make every piece count:

Good: YouTube
Bad: LiftPort

If you use a metaphor, make sure it’s enlightening:

Good: PageFlakes
Bad: Fairtilizer (how is fertilizer related to music?)

Sound

Keep groups of consonants simple and appealing:

Good: Biznik
Bad: Sclipo

Preserve the natural syllabic emphasis of words:

Good: Farecast
Bad: Carticipate

Use sound to support your meaning:

Good: Etsy (a short sound for a hand-made goods marketplace)
Bad: Syncplicity (an awkward blend for an application that’s supposed to sync your computers seamlessly)

Conclusion

If you’re a Web designer, you know that the design process isn’t unfettered creativity. Rather, it involves elegant, creative solutions to specific problems. Naming is no different. Forget the cliche of the crazy adverstising or marketing genius who’s struck by the perfect idea as if by lightning. Approach the naming process in a strategic, rational way, and look for elegant solutions to your particular naming challenge. Even as domain names become scarcer and scarcer, with the right strategy and enough attention to linguistic design principles, building a great name is still possible.

via Smashing Magazin

Identity Using Your Domain Name

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:42:43 +0100

When selecting a domain name it is important to use your common sense. This is because your domain name, or URL, can have a large impact upon online and offline marketing of your website. Domain names that are long or difficult to spell can make people ignore your website. Short domain names remain in the memory of your visitors much better.

When selecting a domain name, ensure that you choose one that will assist you in your marketing niche and strategy. As stated before, you can use your business name and your URL. If your business name is not available then select one that comes very close to what you are doing. Purchasing a business name domain name is not the only way to go; a keyword domain name will suffice.

If you select to use a .net extension, it will be better to wait until after you have found a domain name that is available which is well suited to your type of business. Listed below are some simple steps to follow to assist you in identifying your name brand to the internet community.

Structure your Brand Name. It is always advised to place your domain name and email address on your business cards, letterheads, and all printed materials. You could even place your domain name and email address on your phone recording and the side of your car.

Keep is short & memorable, never select an URL that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet and secure a .com URL. It is strongly recommended to purchase a .com domain name rather than a .net, .info, .biz or anything else. If the domain name that you would like is not available in .com, then continue to search until you find an appropriate name that is not already taken.

Even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with the other extensions, having a .com extension makes it sound as though you have been on the net for some time. It is crucial that you remember that your domain name is an extension of your business and your brand of product or service. For this reason it is important that you make the very best selection for the success of your website.

Use DomainTyper to find your domain name immediately.

by Joseph

Domain Hacks – Expanding the Possibilities

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:24:00 +0100

As DomainTyper now supports Domain Hacks let me explain what the Domain Hacks really means.

Finding a good domain name can look impossible – it seems as if all the good ones are taken. However, a new trend for so-called “domain hacks” could mean that there are more possibilities than you think.

A domain hack is a domain name which uses the top-level domain and/or sublevel domains as part of the actual site name. One of the first examples is “http://inter.net” - .net, the top-level domain, is used to complete the word “internet”. A more recent (and very successful) example is the social bookmarking site “http://del.icio.us”, which uses both a sublevel domain (del) and the .us top-level domain to contribute to spelling out the word “delicious”.

There are also domain hacks which don’t use the top-level domain as part of the site name, but do use a sublevel domain. For example, “http:// 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com”, as well as being one of the world’s longest domain names, uses a sublevel domain “3” and then the first 64 digits of pi as a second-level domain.

Email hacks can also look very effective. For example, “j@mes.com” uses the @ sign in place of an A in order to spell the name “James”. If you are only using your domain for POP3 email, and you have an A somewhere in your name other than the first or last letter, you might want to consider an email hack.

Domain hacks can certainly expand your options for choosing a domain name. However, there are some points to keep in mind if you are considering choosing a domain like this.

- Search engines will “read” the top-level, second-level and sublevel domains as separate words, so even if your complete domain name contains relevant keywords (such as “http://college.camp.us” for a student union site), the search engines will not recognise these keywords if they are partly formed by a subdomain or the top-level domain (so they would only see”college” and “camp”, which might bring you untargeted traffic from people looking for college camping trips).

- People wishing to visit your site may forget to put in the dots (so they might type “www.collegecampus.com” instead of your site name). Del.icio.us have got round this problem by registering “www.delicious.com”, which resolves to the del.icio.us homepage, but if you are using a domain hack because the name you wanted was already taken, this will presumably not be possible. Also, you may well lose traffic to the owners of the “un-dotted” domain.

- Visitors might also forget where to put the dots, especially if you use subdomains. For example, visitors attempting to find Ma.gnolia.com, another social bookmarking site, might type “mag.nolia.com” or “m.agnolia.com”, or a whole variety of other combinations.

- Domain hacks have been criticised for abusing top-level domains by using them in ways for which they were not originally intended. For example, .us is supposed to be used for sites which specifically operate within the US, and other country-code top-level domains could be abused too.

Nevertheless, if you think you can brand your domain hack effectively, and can get round these problems where necessary, the names can be extremely striking and very effective. You could look into some of the less common top-level domains for inspiration, and there are websites available which can do searches for domain hack ideas.

By Natalie Catchpole