It’s All in a Domain Name

I volunteered to be the Vice President of Public Relations for our Toastmasters club, Professionally Speaking and yesterday was our first Officers training session. For anyone who doesn’t know about Toastmasters, its a club that teaches, not only overcoming the fear of public speaking, but it gives you leadership skills and helps to improve upon your self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Mike Swartz says, “Check ’em out.”

During the training session, I announced our club and website, www.professionallyspeakingtoastmasters.org. “Wow!” said a couple other members. I knew the “Wow!” was because of the incredibly long web address.

When selecting a domain name for your organization, there are two important considerations you should be aware of (I wish I knew these before we selected our domain, mjswebsolutions.com).

1. Use the ‘Radio Test’

If you had to announce your website address over the radio, would people understand it or would you have to explain it.

During our first phone call to 2nd Insight, I was told to check out their website. I typed secondinsight.com instead of 2ndinsight.com and got nothing. They explained to me I had to type 2-n-d-insight.com. I informed them of the ‘Radio Test’ and we immediately created two secondary domains – secondinsight.com and secondinsite.com – so others wouldn’t get confused.

2. Use Targeted Keywords

If you can, select a domain name that has your targeted keywords in it.

Before building a website for alamedachurch.org, we changed the domain name from fpcalameda.org to alamedachurch.org. We included two important keywords most people would search on when locating a church: “alameda” and “church”. Now when searching “alameda church” into Google, they’re listed as #3.

(Note: If you separate your keywords with a dash, i.e. alameda-church, Google and other search engines recognize this as two words. This is why the alameda-chuch.org site comes up before alamedachurch.org. But using a dash will not help in your radio test though because you’ll have to explain the dash.)

When selecting a domain name for your organization, remember the “radio test” and try using your prominent, targeted keywords. Both will increase and drive traffic to your website.

’til next time.