The Domain
The domain is basically the name of the website, and thus a very important part of identifying who is behind it.
A domain lesson
A domain name like www.example.com is practically the same as your phone list with names and numbers in it, letting us type in a understandable name instead of the website’s «number».
A website’s «number» is an IP-address, like a phone number to someone in the phone list.
All the several hundred millions of domains are controlled by a gigantic «phone book» called the Domain Name System (DNS).
Each time a new domain is being created, the domain registrar makes sure the domain name and its linked IP-address(es) are distributed across the DNS, similar to being added to the phone book.
All the world’s countries has a unique Top Level Domain (TLD), like .no for Norway, .fr for France and so on.
A neutral, non-profit, government-supervised organization is responsible for the overall maintenance of its country’s TLD.
Below the national registry organization are commercial companies, called registrars, selling and administering the domains on behalf of everyone owning a domain. Registrars are manually approved by the national registry organization, after completing a manual verification and an exam that proves they are technically capable of registering and administering domains on behalf of others.
Country-specific TLDs are more specifically called ccTLDs (country code Top Level Domain’s), while the most prominent domains like .com and .org are gTLDs (generic Top Level Domain’s). sTLDs (sponsored Top Level Domain’s) are maintained by commercial corporations or large organizations, and includes TLDs as .xxx (maintained by ICM and dedicated for pornographic sites), .app (sponsored by Google, and dedicated to online apps) and .travel (sponsored by Tralliance Corp., and dedicated to travel-related websites).
Many less-known TLDs like .info and .biz has been widely used on spammy websites as they have been easier to acquire than .com and similar, and although Google says the chosen TLD is not a direct ranking factor, they have said it is less likely to gain trust from the users by using any of the less-known TLDs.
So, use widely used TLDs, preferably .com, which almost 50% of all the world’s websites are run under.
Shall we have one domain for all, or one per country, or?
If you have a domestic focus in one country only, then always go with the local TLD, like www.finn.no if the website is Norwegian-only.
If you have a regional focus with a handful of countries, and you want to build up a presence in each country along with the brand-awareness, consider using each country’s TLD, so www.finn.se for Sweden and www.finn.dk for Denmark.
If you have a regional focus with a handful of countries, and want to give the users a feeling your service being 100% presence in their country respectively, consider using a local word to describe the service more accurately, like www.hitta.se for Sweden and www.find.co.uk for UK.
If you have an international- or global focus, always go with one domain
With- or without www.? And what about sub-domains?
First, a domain can have an unlimited number of sub-domains, like login.example.com or eu.example.com, and for the domain www.example.com, the «www» is actually a sub-domain.
Doh! Is www.example.com a sub-domain?! So that means that Facebook runs its entire website on a sub-domain, www.facebook.com?
Yes. As you remember from chapter 1, the World Wide Web as we know it was just one of many services built on top of the Internet, along with services like Telnet to log onto servers, FTP to transfer files, SMTP to send mail and Gopher to exchange information online (Gopher was the prehistoric variant of World Wide Web) and more. All these services were made available on sub-domains like telnet.example.com, ftp.example.com, and - for the websites - on www.example.com.
Today, few people use telnet and even FTP (for the better, as both these protocols are totally open / unencrypted), and which has been replaced by better and more secure services, and a normal Internet user wouldn’t know- or care of this.
Not long ago, in the age of Internet Explorer 8, two-character domains without www, for example hd.no, would not work optimally in terms of cookie handling, making it a reason for itself to have the www as part of the domain.
Search engines like Google does not rank a site higher or lower depending on using www or not.
So what to use?
Unless very good reason otherwise, always keep the www «sub-domain» as part of the FQDN.
Although search engines has lately become good at automatically handling the redirect part between the «two domains», it is still strongly recommended to add a permanent redirect rule for all non-www URLs to the with-www URLs, so that for example example.com/contact automatically redirects to www.example.com/contact, as users still type in direct URLs in the browser, often dropping the www. This redirect rule is a global setting that the tech people will easily add either in the domain configuration or on the server hosting the website.
Don’t use numbers unless strictly needed
The company 1-800-Flowers shall definitely stick with its www.1800flowers.com domain, while a fictive car rental company named Laura Cars should not go with www.lauracars99.com just because www.lauracars.com was already taken. Instead, Laura Cars should try hard to acquire the www.lauracars.com domain.
Newly created domains needs to be warmed up
A ranking signal is how old the website- and further, the domain, is. When creating a completely new website on a newly purchased and created domain, it will in most cases take some time for it to be trust-worthy.
Though, if you create a new company; Brunstad Corp., which will be selling financial advise, and manage to acquire the domain www.brunstad.com, which was first registered back in 1997, and which was previously the website of the Brunstad Christian Church, then you will not get any bonus points for starting of with an old domain.
With that said, the acquisition of the domain was smart in the long run, which SEO is all about.
Get the best domain name sooner than later
If the entity behind the website is a corporation, and the name of that entity is Razor John Corp., and the domain is www.razor-john-blades.net, then Razor John Corp. is simply telling the the users that «Sorry, we couldn’t afford the .com-domain as we haven’t been as successful as we wanted just yet, so we will be sticking with the .net-domain until we get there, together with all the spammy .net websites».
The www.razor-john-blades.net domain fails on many other parts as well, which we will get into in this section.
And yea, just to be clear, the absolutely best domain Razor John should build its business upon is www.razorjohn.com.
What if the perfect domain is taken?
Try to acquire the domain, though keep in mind this can be time-consuming so considering using a domain-broker to assist you can be a smart investment. Time is money.
Also note that even domains that are not labelled as «For sale» are indeed for sale. As the saying goes; Everything is for sale at the right price.
Often small, domestic companies or organizations being around for a long time and with no huge online presense has managed to acquire a domain «over their top», for example www.bikefinder.com. In such cases it is recommended to simply spend some time to see if there are other reasonably efficient domains they can move over to, like www.bikefinder.io, and then offer them a reasonable compensation like USD$2000 for the «swap».
Keep in mind domains are technical terms and so should you choose this path, be sure to offer a full assistance in the technical part of the process, either alone if you have the knowledge, or through a technical supplier, to handle everything related to email and so on and so forth.
Typical process of acquiring an existing domain
Contact the domain owner to offer a reasonable price for it. If their contact details is not listed on the page, try searching for a «whois»-service to be able to find the owner. Note that domains can be tricky to find the owner of, not least the email or phone to the owner, which a domain-broker will be able to handle more easily.
Start to offer 30% of what your upper set price tag is, to see the interest. The domain owner will in most cases refuse this, however this gives them a «market price»-suggestion, which tells they cannot 10x this towards the price they were dreaming of.
Try ending up with anywhere between 50-100% of your set price tag. If the owner of the domain still refuses, stay cold and hold your horses for a few weeks or months. In most cases they will then get back to you with a new suggestion.
What is a domain worth?
A good domain for an international service or brand is quickly worth USD$50.000 and upwards. If www.razorjohn.com was available for sale, a reasonable price tag could have been anywhere between USD$20.000 - USD$100.000, while a more niche and domestic domain like www.trekunst.no would be reasonable priced at USD$400.
The domain rule of thumbs
The domain name should be the same as the entity name of the corporation-, organization-, or brand name.
Avoid complex domains with hyphens and multiple keywords.
If the visitors are US-based or global, go with .com. If its a domestic site, go with your national TLD, like .de, .co.uk, .no, and so on. If it is a tech-site, consider .io as the TLD.
Keep your domain at a maximum-length of 15 characters, preferably between 8-10 characters.
Don’t use numbers in the domain unless its an important part of your name.
Organizations and similar should use the .org TLD if there is an international focus. If the organization is only doing work in for example France, then it should use .fr which is the TLD of France.
Blogs and other types of websites should have a domain name identical to the name of the website, e.g if there is an English-written blog called «Carla’s Cakes», with hundreds of cake receipts on it, the domain should optimally be www.carlascakes.com or, secondary, www.carlascakereceipts.com
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