A domain name is the website address for your business – e.g. www.mybusiness.com.au. Choosing the right domain name is important for a variety of reasons.

The following guide will help keep you on the right path to ensure your select the best website address -

• Keep it short – the longer it is, the harder it will be for potential customers to remember
• Try not to abbreviate – abbreviations don’t mean much to people not in the know
• Choose a .com.au if you have an Australian target market – search engines give preference to .com.au domain names in Australia
• Incorporate relevant keywords – e.g. www.tonyscarparts.com.au to get your website clicked on more often

I often see clients who have purchased hundreds of domain names with the intention of displaying their new website under all of these addresses. This can cause issues with a website’s search engine visibility because the websites will be seen as being duplicates of one another, and may be issued with a ranking penalty.

Registering a few good domain names to keep them from your competitors is acceptable, but ask your website hosting company to point these all back to your main domain name.

We can help you with domain registrations, domain recommendations, and potentially save you some money by pointing you towards inexpensive domain registrars including www.crazydomains.com.au

A big misconception in the industry is that a ‘hit’ on a website equates to having a ‘visitor’. This is not true, yet many organisations like to inflate their marketing hype by claiming their website gets ‘millions of hits’.

A ‘hit’ occurs when a component of a web page is loaded. For example, if a person visits a web page that loads 3 photos, and 6 button icons, this would equate to at least 9 hits (despite being only one visitor). If this person then looked at 5 other pages on the website, this may equate to 50+ hits!

Website statistics programs are now sophisticated enough to know the difference between a hit and a visitor. Essentially, hits don’t matter. Knowing your visitors however will give you a more accurate perspective of how many people are looking at your website.

Google provides one of the world’s best website statistics tool for free – Google Analytics. This tool gives tremendous insight as to how visitors arrive at and react to a website.

Did you know you can get on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN within an hour? A form of search engine advertising called ‘pay-per-click’ is sweeping the world as a cost-effective means of obtaining instant visibility across the major search engines.

Compared with traditional forms of advertising, businesses can target customers actively looking for their products or services, and track how they interact with their website once they arrive.

As the name suggests, the advertiser pays the search engine every time someone clicks on their ad. These ads can be targeted geographically, and only appear for keyword searches as specified by the advertiser. A cap can be put on the advertisers daily budget to ensure the costs don’t blow out considerably.

Pay-per-click advertising works best for businesses with websites that are successful in converting their visitors into customers (e.g. florists), or sell items with good profit margins (e.g. cosmetic surgeons). Whilst these advertising campaigns can be set up by anyone, it is best to use someone who is qualified by Google and has had considerable experience in managing these campaigns. The way the campaigns are architected is crucial to achieving a good return on investment.

We have had numerous clients approach us with Google AdWords accounts that they set up themselves, wasting tens of thousands of dollars because they were not architected correctly.

I am astounded to see that some of Perth’s major educational institutions are teaching students how to build websites with considerable amounts of graphics, animations, and very little content. As these students graduate, they set up their own businesses and sell their services to the WA business community who are taken in by the stunning ‘look’ of what they can produce.

Our business, PositionMEonline, and other web marketing companies of a professional ilk are unfortunately left to break the news to these business owners that their websites will be difficult to find on search engines. The search engines thrive on text content, not images or animations, meaning that many WA websites are missing out on new customers who use generic search phrases to find information online.

Businesses in the market for a new website should always ask how their web designer intends on getting visitors to their new website. Remember, marketing a website is more important than simply building one.