What’s in a name? Domain name and hosting strategies.

There are hundreds of articles on the subject of domain names all over the web. Most of them deal with the choice of the domain names associated to a brand, a company or on why top level domain names are important in the definition of your SEO strategies. Actually, a lot of these articles talk about what could be coined as “the usability of domain names”.

The usability of domain names.

The usability of domain names is the whole marketing jargon buster used to help a client define a domain name. It is here to define branding and visibilityof a brand online. One great resource for that is “Building the Perfect Beast” (pdf document) by Igor International.

The elements are generally:

• Size of the domain name (the smaller the better, as it seems).
• Easy to remember (to print in your customers’ minds).
• Business related (aiming your field).
• Top level domain (to maximize indexation).
• Inclusion of keywords (improving ranking through the domain name).

You might be careful.

Some of these advice might have flip sides to them though. The size of the domain name, if coupled with the inclusion of keywords, might not be compatible if you’re trying to become a leader in your field. An example might be DCDM where the name De Chazal du Mée is long and does not give the information that the company is that of chartered accountants.

As such their domain name does not show this aspect either. OK, DCDM is known in Mauritius, what about the international aspect? The branding does not include the fact that the company is big in Africa. Maybe some domain name such as dcdm-chartered-accoutants.tld (top level domain name) would help. To push the envelope a little bit further, the domain name would take care of at least 4 of the elements stated above.

Local you said?

What about local search then? It might seem cool to look for interesting domain names but if the primary audience is local, it would be better not to aim past the target. For example, the Web Design Bureau targets Mauritian web designers. The domain name is therefore a top level one mixed with the “mauritius” keyword. It could have been more specific but this is like that for one specific reason that will not be discussed here.

In a local context it is a good thing to aim for local domain extensions. For example: BBC keeps it domain name centered around the UK www.bbc.co.uk, TF1 in France has a .fr and CNN has a .com (generic extension used in US instead of the .us). None has really gone for the .tv extension but the MBC has tried it out.

What about hosting?

Any domain name with a real website needs to be hosted. Hosting does influence SEO. First of all there is the neighbourhood. On mutualised servers, some domain names can be blacklisted or have bad reputation (the Bureau suffers a bit from hosted porn neighbourhood). Therefore, one should make sure that the site is clearly well hosted.

In the case of multiple websites, one interesting thing is to work on different C class domain IPs. Each site has a unique IP number. If different websites are to be hosted, having really different C class IPs can help when working on different sites’ net linking. Different addresses mean different servers to the robots, so it might really be a win-win strategy to use different hosting companies.