So on the one hand, your business name is relatively safe, but on the other, Australian domains are at least twice as expensive and can take 10 times longer to set up. To find the registrar of record for a particular Australian domain name, use the public WHOIS service.

Domain names are becoming less important

Are Domain Names Important from mariz cute on Vimeo.

Your domain name and web site are separate

Many people don’t realise that their domain name (the url of a site e.g. www.yourname.com) and their server space are completely independent of each other. You can point a domain name to any server.

What is my server?

Your server is a computer connected to the Internet. It’s literally a computer like the one you have now, except it’s plugged into the internet. Your site is literally on a hard drive in a directory. Commonly referred to as hosting, your server is the place where your database and website files live. Text, images, graphics are stored on your server.

Okay. What’s a database and why do I need one?

You’ll need a database if you’re planning to update your site. Unlike a web page running JavaScript (a simple but very effective programming language for web pages) a database retains information over time. A web page alone can’t really do that. Well it can, but not for very long. When you go from one page to the next, any data stored in a page script such as JavaScript is lost. So JavaScript is not very useful for storing stuff long term.

What is a domain name?

You can buy a domain name anywhere across the web. Once you’ve bought your $7 .com domain name, in your domain name settings, you can “point” it to the server where your website lives. Australian domain names cost $35 for 2 years (wholesale), most of which is made up of the Australian domains admin fee.

Is there any advantage to buying multiple domain names?

A lot of people buy several domain names because they are relatively cheap at about $7 wholesale (April, 2012). You can park other domains over the top of a parent domain, but unless you are actually going to build a separate website for each domain name, there’s not much else you can do with additional domain names. They are useful if you are thinking about building another website further down the track or if you intend to hold on to them for the sole purpose of keeping them from competitors. This defensive move is probably not necessary because it’s a million times more important to have an effective website.

What’s a parent domain name?

It’s best to build your website on top of the most meaningful domain name (and park your business name on top of it). I didn’t do this. My domain name is www.geoffreymultimedia.com which is not that meaningful. Www.websites.com would be more meaningful because that’s what I do. In hindsight, I should have parked www.geoffreymultimedia.com over that domain name.

Google tends to give the most attention to your domain name and then the title of your site (as well as quality in-bound links and headers etc. Read more about search engine optimisation for humans here.). I would be more likely to be found in a search for “websites” than “geoffrey” or even “multimedia” for that matter. But all this is academic. It’s really better to have a nicely functioning website.

Is this domain name dance important?

Ultimately, in business terms, it doesn’t matter what your domain name is. One question to ponder is is my domain name easily communicable by phone?. I have issues with Geoffrey because it can be spelt so many ways. Is your domain name able to be found by the search engines or is there simply too much competition? You ought to really have a site which is worth going to in the first place (read this treatise on creating the perfect website).

Most websites are about a company’s vanity and the overall design. But content is and always has been the absolute most important thing about your website.

A warning about domain names

As a general rule : don’t punch your potential domain name into any old website form when searching for a new domain. Web form info can end up anywhere and in some cases, simply searching for your domain name triggers a behind the scenes script which automatically reserves that name. It’s cruel but true. The hosting provider where you searched for a domain name can reserves it because you have searched for it. If you go looking elsewhere for that domain name, you find that someone mysteriously already has it, or at best, you have to use their server to host your site.

Punch potential names into your browser’s address bar in the very short term – and if the site address comes up with a “not found” – put an order in with your webmaster. We know where to go. Your web guy (probably a guy) will want a 2nd and possible 3rd choice – just in case the domain is already taken.

The last word on registering a domain name

• Think search engines first and forget about your company name. “Www.refurbishedshoes.com” is more likely to give better search results than “www.dinklewear.com.au” in a search for “refurbished shoes”. While Dinklewear may be a respectable family name – on the web, Dinklewear has no meaning and your aim is to sell shoes.
• Search engines give preference to domain names with the search term inside it.
• Keep control of your domain name. Don’t give it to your web design company (just point it to their servers). Register your domain first and then find a good server. Most web companies (not Geoffrey) will host your website on their computer. Later down the track you might decide to go with another host or web developer and getting your old domain name back – particularly if it’s your company name – can be troublesome.

To cut a long story short, web companies don’t like losing money and often make it very difficult for the new developer to retrieve your domain name.

My general advice is to buy the domain name yourself and point that name to a reputable server of your own. That way, if something goes wrong, or you have a falling out with your developer (that’s never happened here at Geoffrey Multimedia) the domain name is under your control.

If you do get into domain name bother

Most people usually have irrelevant or useless domain names, so if that’s you, it might be a good idea to just let it go and purchase a more useful name for your industry.

I hope this has helped. If I could get paid for the many hours I’ve spent retrieving domain names from sneaky web companies, I’d probably be rich. Don’t forget, that even though we write these articles, Geoffrey Multimedia also builds beautiful websites, so get in touch with us if you’re in the market and want a no-obligation chat about your website plans.

Until next week, happy domain name hunting.

• Australian domain name administration
• Australian WHOIS service
• .com, .net and .org domain names cost about $7 (wholesale)
• .com.au, .net.au and .org.au domain names cost $35 for 2 years (wholesale)

Sometimes it is.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a very misunderstood term. In the web design industry, the term is oft met with scorn and sidelong glances. Even Google Webmaster Central warns about dubious SEO operatives.

If an SEO firm says they can get you to the top of page 1 in a search, they’re more interested in taking your money than telling you the facts.

Nobody knows how Google’s algorithm works. It’s a closely guarded secret because billions of dollars are at stake.

Google have been accused of anti-competitive business practices because that very algorithm often determines who gets the business. Add this to the fact that many of your competitors are also employing SEO experts and it’s easy to see why SEO is often referred to as “The Google Dance.”

With too many people on the SEO dance floor, your toes will get crushed. So why dance in the first place? Why not simply build a better website?

Black & White Hat SEO Marketing

I’ve had sites banned from search results because I unwittingly employed Black Hat SEO techniques.

Doing things such as;

• innocently using the same phrase too many times on a home page
• using invisible writing (white text on white background)
• using 0 size (zero pixel) keyphrases

will get you banned by Google. Search engines consider Black Hat SEO techniques “spamming.” They send spiders (little programs) to crawl the web looking for genuine and viable sites. If you are caught “cheating” the natural flow, they see you as a spammer. It’s completely understandable and you know what? As a reformed web developer, I’m with them.

More blatant techniques such as building doorway websites with the aim of funnelling customers to your main website or flooding search engine results with your results are also considered “Black Hat” or “unfair” by search engines. If caught using these techniques, you’ll find yourself mysteriously omitted from the search results.

In my case, I was banned for a month and my client lost a LOT of business (we’re friends again, now). I’m currently doing an SEO audit as many clients have asked for Search Optimisation services.

The best thing you can do is build a great website. Google always finds me (and my client sites) and ranks me highly in search. I don’t really care about being number one as I have enough work. It’s hard to accept praise for getting a client to number one in their industry when all that may have happened is that other SEO operatives might have been having a sandwich at the time.

Search engines want to give humans genuine results, not manipulated responses to a search query.

SPAM is bad, mmm’kay?

I’m forever deleting spam from my inbox, sent to me by self-proclaimed SEO experts promising higher rankings in search results and thousands of new customers. I get emails from clients asking if they need to “do anything” about seemingly important SEO emails.

My advice?

Write a blog.

Writing might actually be the hardest thing to do on Earth, but by jove, the pen is still far mightier than the sword.

Q : What do search engines do? (Click here)

While there are many things you can do to improve your web site ranking, you really need to keep your eye on the ball. That ball is NOT SEOnecessarily. Before obsessively monitoring your position on the Google search page like it’s a stock market, ask yourself a very simple question. Is your site worth visiting? There’s no point in ranking number one in a search for “hardware stores melville” if your site is impossible to navigate and you’ve forgotten to add a contact form. You have to be worth it.

Client : Why doesn’t anyone share my enthusiasm?

Stop promoting your services

One thing I’ve learnt in my 16 years as a webmaster, is that the web turns everything upside down. Literally. If your site is about promoting your services, increasing brand exposure, building a customer database and showcasing your awards … you’ve got it all wrong. That’s “old school” thinking. Your website isn’t for you. It’s for your customers. Sure. You’ll check your new web layout on your friend’s iPad, set it as your office homepage and gloat over your company history and embedded YouTube ad for hours. After all, you’ve come a long way. Plus, your logo looks great (although it could be bigger) and your company name ranks #1 in a Google search for “Homocentric Slippers.” You’ve made it!

Client : But where are the customers? This is the 24hr web. New customers should be pounding my door and I should be collecting untapped leads and making sales while I sleep. Something’s wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Don’t subscribe to “if you build it they will come.” They will – for about 3.5 seconds on average – but if you’re boring or banging on about your company and your awards, they’ll quickly go find someone who can give them something worthwhile. There are plenty of other places to go.

You are enthusiastic about your new company website because it’s really a substitute for YOU. Nobody cares about your company unless they find something of value in it for themselves. Your employees will be loyal if you respect them, give them a pay rise, a bonus, or let them take the afternoon off. Customers will care if you include a few useful freebies with their swiftly delivered product.

Is there some way to offer an upgrade path on your physical item or service? Think outside the box?

If I’m going to buy a product, I’ll research it … to death. I’ll ask questions on Whirlpool Forums. Attending such forums and answering other people’s questions not only is good for business, but it’s good for SEO because it creates in-bound links. Sometimes price isn’t the only factor. Shipping, delivery details and speed of service might be important. I’m often interested in an “upgrade path.” It’s all the rage with software. Buy it today for $50 and when a new one comes out get 25% off!

The key to a successful website is to find an obvious (or overlooked) weakness in your market, and deal it properly on your website.

Find the weakness

It’s kind of why I’m writing this blog entry. SEO is such a minefield, that I really needed to get this off my chest. Also, to be honest, the web industry is full of sharks and charlatans, feeding off the technologically illiterate. I may get picked up by the Google search robot writing this article and (possibly) rank slightly highter on subjects like SEO, web development and web design in Perth, Western Australia, (there I go – seeding those crawlers, again) but my real volition here is to help wean small businesses (and people in general) off an unhealthy obsession with Search Engine Optimisation. Why rank highly if your site is nothing more than an egocentric business card floating in cyberspace? Why even have a website in that instance.

If you don’t want to put the effort in, it’s better to spend your money on a strategic letterdrop than build a website. I encouraged one client to do just that and he got lots of work. He came back two years later for a website.

I don’t know about you, but I want to visit a great website that is updated frequently with lots of information and customer feedback and reviews or the service etc. I want to go where other people go and I want to read about what they say about the company. Good and bad.

Blog about it …

Search engines read. In fact, until they come up with a better image recognition software, that’s all they do presently. So if you have something to say, write about it. And let others respond to your writing. Be brave. Go with the good and improve the bad.

If you take a look at all the great professional websites in the web design industry and you’ll notice something in common.

• www.sitepoint.com
• www.alistapart.com
• www.sixrevisions.com
• www.designfestival.com

All these web industry sites revolve around a blog structure for a reason.

My Company Name?

Nobody will search for your company name besides you. They might search for “comfortable slippers queensland” but they won’t tap in “homocentric slippers”. They’d be nuts, wouldn’t they? So why obsess about your company name – up there in lit pixels?

What do I do?

List 5 reasons why you visit 5 of your favourite websites and the answer will be staring right back at you.

You’ll probably find they are doing one or more of the following things.

• Giving users a voice.
• Answering questions publicly.
• Providing good service.
• Posting the good and the bad.
• Encouraging discussion.

They certainly won’t be obsessing about their company name or the size of their logo.

SEO Experts

Yes. There is such a thing as an SEO expert, but the only one I regularly read (and therefore trust) is Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing. I read this marketing blog daily. He’s a sensible man who doesn’t do the hard sell and speaks plain English about search engines and what you can do to rank higher. Here’s a link to Ian’s site.

Interestingly enough, like the web professional sites listed above, Ian also presents information using a traditional blog format. He knows. The most important page on your site is your home page. And getting new content to the top of that page is best. If you are refreshing your website daily with regularly updated content (weekly is a close second), in the absense of a decent SEO budget, that should be all you need to worry about. That is, Providing you’ve had someone like me coding your site from the ground up – and with the Google search engines in mind.

I’ll leave you with one last question, because there’s another well-established industry that operates a lot like SEO …

Q : Would you pay for weather updates? (Click here)

Below is an assessment I sent to Ross at Canning Bridge Cycles. He’s become both a friend and associate over the years, but even he admits there’s a lot more he can do with the virtualside of his business. Naturally, he doesn’t know how to write website code but there are many things he can do to his site. The following is re-printed here with his permission.

How to make your website work harder for you

A few years ago I built a site for the Bicycle Transport Authority. I’m pleased to say they now have a thriving and very active community of cyclists with up to 5,000 unique vistors every month (thanks to Google’s Panda update). They have a lot of two-way (customer / client) interaction.

Which brings me to my next point . . .

Harvey needed to engage customers and potential customers in a conversation, rather than using his might in the form of a shouty newspaper ad. Shouting at potential clients using an expensive newspaper ad is not “conversation” and will probably lead to (as it did in the Middle East) a little “civil unrest”. Most of us can’t afford $100,000 ads.

Gone are the days of one-way advertising. The Harvey Norman strategy didn’t play out too well for him. Rather than writing in the newspaper margins, people responded to Gerry’s ad in an embarrassingly public way using Twitter, Facebook and online customer satisfaction forums such as Iinet’s Whirlpool.

There’s a moral to the Harvey Norman story. Business need to listen to their customers and not talk so much (ie. “sell”). The latest (annoying) term for doing business is “conversation marketing” but starting that conversation is really more about customer loyalty than it is about old ideas about “marketing” . . .

It’s also a good to not open outbound links in a new browser tab or window. It’s a bit like saying good-bye to a customer in your shop, but when they turn to leave, they find your hand in their back pocket. So it was great NOT to see this common practice.

Linking brand decals to their respective sites is similar linking your main logo back to the home page. Nobody really questions it.

In the web design industry, it’s generally considered bad netiquette to open a new window, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) hasn’t even included the ability in the strict xHTML 1.0 mark-up specification.

In other words, soon you won’t be able to open new windows. Having said that – the W3C do change their minds a lot and pop-up links might come back.

What I mean by a shop “button” – is a graphic, in a prominent place somewhere in the margin or on the main page of the site that links to the off-site shop. Clearly linking to an online shop re-enforces trust.

The web is and always worked best as a connector, a community creator. I remember stumbling across a community of used teabag collectors. They were spread out all over the world. In any one city there probably wasn’t enough people to fill a small scout hall, but across the world, I found a virtual scout hall meeting in full swing.

That’s pretty much a summary of the message I sent Ross and it’s certainly going to give him something to talk about over the Christmas break. I normally charge about $250 dollars for a full, 20 point website report. But if you are reading this, for January only, I can do a proper report for your existing website for $175. But only if you’re reading this. Knowing how these things go, you’ll probably get me to update a few pages on your own website.

Hopefully you got something out of this. I know Ross did.