What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.

Cities need to provide real-time bill payment options online

Municipal customers expect to find convenience features in their local municipal website. With the mass adoption of broadband, online banking, ecommerce, and web applications, it is no longer a novelty to add an online bill-pay system to a municipal website. Delaware.Net builds real-time online bill-paying services for small and large towns, as well as corporations and utility companies. When complete, city customers can look up their account online securely, and pay their outstanding balances using a credit card. We can integrate with any popular billing package that runs on an SQL database server, or that has an import/export API (Application Programming Interface). The API serves as a gateway that allows us to look up and insert successful payment information into a municipal billing system.

Who pays for credit card fees?

An important challenge we have seen in working with large municipalities and utility companies is determining who will pay the fees that merchant providers charge. To accept credit cards online, there will be typically two fees involved; the merchant account fee, which is a percentage of each transaction, and the payment gateway service (such as Authorize.net), which makes the transaction real-time in your website. If you simply tack-on these fees to the bill amounts that your customers are paying, then they will generally not use your online bill-pay system. Why? Because postage stamps are always going to cost less than the fees that you add to the transaction if they are percentage-based. Since your customers are able to gain convenience by using the website, and since your city employees won’t need to open paper envelopes and process checks (expensive in labor costs), the online fee amounts are generally a wash if the transaction amounts are under $500 on average. For this reason, you may want to limit the total amount that can be transacted through the website, to minimize fee exposure, or you can calculate your total cost of providing the online bill-pay service and incorporate it into your fee structures across the board.

How NOT to introduce online bill-pay to your customers

I witnessed one utility company that had a successful online bill-pay system, and then outsourced it all to a separate bill-pay company so that they would not have to worry about the fees any longer. The problem was, each bill had $20 tacked on as a service fee. It really looked and felt like a bait-and-switch to the utility company’s customers, because they would start to enter payment information and then get hit with the $20 transaction fee. As you can imagine, customers stopped using the service almost immediately.

How much are the credit card fees?

There are two primary fees involved in accepting credit cards online. The first is the payment gateway service, and the second is the merchant account fee.

The payment gateway service is straightforward and inexpensive. Typically they are $90 – $140 to setup, and then you have a $10 per month fee, and a 15 cent transaction fee. The payment gateway talks to the card issuing bank, the card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover), and your merchant account. The payment gateway service is required for real-time transactions.

Merchant account fees are where things can get expensive. With fees generally between 1% and 3% of the total transaction amount, with the average being about 2.3%. In my opinion, a municipality should never pay more than 2% for merchant account fees. This is because merchant account providers use a risk assessment chart to calculate your fees. I have seen these charts, and you can find them if you do a web search. The lowest credit card fees are 1%, and this is typically the rate for a grocery store – they ALWAYS get the lowest rates. A typical mom-and-pop web business can get about 2.3%. As a municipality, your transactions are much more trustworthy than a typical online retailer. It is important to note that ALL MERCHANT ACCOUNT FEES ARE NEGOTIABLE so you MUST shop around.

Why you shouldn’t just sign-up for a merchant account from your bank:

A common mistake that I see is when an organization goes to their bank for a merchant account. This is because the vast majority of banks simply RESELL merchant accounts from one of the large merchant account providers. You should shop around and get a quote from several companies so that you can get the best rate. Even a fraction of a percent difference in cost can add up to big dollars in savings when you obtain a merchant account. I have dealt with MANY different merchant account providers over the years, and you need to be careful to make sure that they have experience with online transactions. Surprisingly – many do not. We have worked with PNC Bank corporate as a reseller of their merchant account, but we in the end, they too were simply reselling someone else. Today, we have a close relationship with a merchant provider that has superb rates, and they offer great customer service. I can’t post the name here, but contact me directly (888-432-7965 x100) and I can give you their name.

Integration with billing systems

While it may sound impressive to have a real-time synchronization between your billing system and your website, this is typically not how the two systems interact with each other. A batch import/export system that can be automated to run each day (or each hour) is much more reliable than a live data connection between both servers. This is the only way that we build our payment systems. The payment transaction is real-time, but the synchronization with your billing system is not.

Security and Data Storage

Unless requested by our customers, we do not store any credit card data or financial data that comes through the payment systems. We simply pass the transaction information to the payment gateways, and insert the “approved” or “declined” codes into the data tables that we synchronize with your billing system. All of our web accessible payment forms are secured with 128bit SSL security, which is the same as an online banking website.

If you have any additional questions about municipal online bill-pay systems, visit our website at www.delaware.net and shoot me an email.

A lot of our customers need to create Adobe PDF documents so that they can upload them into their websites (using our content management system), and also so that they can send them as email newsletter attachments.

There are several free PDF generators on the market, but the one that I like to use is called PDFCreator. It is an open-source project on SourceForge.net, and it works great. After you download and install the program, it becomes a print driver for Windows, so that you can create a PDF in any program that you use in Windows. So if you are working on a MS Word document, you click “print” and then “PDFCreator”. The program does the rest. Keep in mind that you won’t have all of the PDF markup and editing features that you would get if you bought the full version of Acrobat (Adobe’s program that creates PDFs).

Enjoy!

This is why I am especially proud that we have been selected to build the new City of Rehoboth website. We were up against two other good firms for this project, and I am happy that we won. Our pitch for this project encompassed what we saw as the true needs for the city moving forward, including specialized hosting needs dynamic applications, and data security needs.

This is a special project for us, and it will use all of our latest web applications. The City of Rehoboth already uses our Team-Logic system for their Intranet, and the new website will allow us to integrate the two systems (website and Intranet) to provide a total end-to-end system for the city. One of the ideas that came out of our meetings with the city is very innovative, and we are underway now. Keep an eye out for this new site!

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

The written content that is necessary to build the web site can come from a lot of areas, including brochures, interviews, videos, history, testimonials, product information, and more. When none of this information is available for the web site, then it might be time to employ a copy writer that can help you to write this content. Typically a professional copy writer will charge about $1,500 or more to help write the copy for a small web site. We know of several copy writers that we can contact if a client wants to go in that direction, but most of the time we end up helping the client to organize this content in one respect or another.

When planning your new web site, you should begin to gather and organize all of this content for your web developer, and it should all be provided in digital format (such as Microsoft Word).

The purpose of this article is to explain what is involved in showing real estate listings dynamically in your real estate web site, whether you are an agent or a real estate broker. I’ll explain how it works, what you will need, what is new in 2007, and what the costs are.

1. Understand Broker Reciprocity (BR)

Before you get real estate listings in your web site, you need to understand what broker reciprocity is. First off, Realtors don’t own the listings that are assigned to them – their broker does. This is why Realtors must work for a broker, and why brokers have to start off working as a Realtor for another Broker for a number of years. It is almost like an apprenticeship.

OK, so the broker owns the listings. The broker also has an account with the local MLS system, where they upload the listing data. This is usually done by an office manager or data entry person at the brokerage. In the past, these listings were all that a broker could pull from the area MLS system for their web site. So just a few years ago, you would visit a local broker’s web site and only see their listings. When the market picked-up, it became nearly impossible for brokers to keep a listing inventory populated – enter broker reciprocity.

Broker reciprocity is a database of listings where brokers agree to sell and post each other’s listings. If your broker isn’t participating in broker reciprocity, then you are missing out because your listings aren’t being shown on all of the other sites that are also participating. You might be saying “but what about Realtor.com?”, and my answer is “what about it?”. Realtor.com IS the National Association of Realtors, so they obviously have special access to data. Their site is also hard to use and randomized to keep listings fair to all participants. This provides a great opportunity for brokers to build their own web site and shine much brighter in local search engine search results.

So before you can put listings from the MLS into your web site, you should check with your broker to make sure they already have their broker reciprocity agreements setup.

2. Understand that Broker Reciprocity feeds are tied to a domain name

This throws a lot of people, and I am really not sure why. I’ll do my best to explain it simply. When you get a listing feed, it is tied to one domain name. That domain name either belongs to the broker, or the agent. It IS possible for multiple agents to have web sites using one feed if the domain is the same.

There are three types of web sites for broker reciprocity:

1. The brokerage web site
   Imagine for a moment that your broker’s domain name is www.somebrokerage.com. Imagine also that the broker has a licensed feed from the local MLS provider(s), which is tied to that domain name. The broker can now have a site for the brokerage, where all of the local MLS listings are shown, as long as the broker of record for each of those listings is also participating with broker reciprocity. So far, so good. Your agency has a fully-functional web site with MLS listings in it.
2. The shared agent site
   What about the agents that want their own site, but who don’t want to purchase their own feeds? It is possible, with a little domain name trickery. Assuming the brokerage has a fully-functioning site with BR listings in it, agents can have a site under what I call a sub-domain, which looks like this: http://joeagent.somebrokerage.com. Here you see that the domain name is technically still that of the brokerage, so the agent is still using the listing feed in an authorized way. By changing the “www” to the agent’s name, a separate site can be setup for that agent. There are MANY real estate web design companies now selling templates to real estate agencies that give individual agents this type of site, but this is how it is done. Most of these templates are not very impressive, but it is a way for an agent to get started quickly.
3. The individual agent site
   The real estate agents that I meet that are really serious about leveraging the web for marketing all use this approach. They buy their own domain name, and then they buy their OWN listing feed from the local MLS service. The cost for the feed alone is typically around $350 per year, which is nothing if you are a successful agent. Agents that balk at this fee that say that they are serious about search engine results and online marketing are kidding themselves. After the feed is purchased, the agents also needs to purchase web site design. If the design company (like Delaware.Net) has already integrated feeds into MANY web sites, then it should be easy to choose between a turn-key templated design, or one that is more custom-built.

Since real estate listing feeds are tied to your domain name, and they are essentially a legal agreement, you can use them with any web design firm. My advice is to go with a firm that has been around for over five years, and that has a lot of experience with hosting and managing MLS listings. I know of several small shops that try to accomplish managing their feeds on their own, with a lot of issues (some legal). Currently, Delaware.Net manages the importing of over 70,000 listings per day from only two area MLS services. This gives us coverage over Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. Delaware is the only state in that list in which we have 100% coverage, but our MLS integration keeps growing.

Delaware.Net’s RealMLS Broker Reciprocity Application has the following features:

• All TrendMLS listings
• All Offutt listings (both services combined into one search)
• Virtual Tours
• Search Engine Optimization for Realtors
• Google Maps for both city searches and for directions to listings
• New Construction Management (models, features, plot plans, much more)
• Open houses module
• Farm & land search and listing management
• Commercial search and listing management
• Manually add any listing (including rentals) to your site’s search
• Featured Listings (choose which listings show up on your home page)
• Multiple offices
• Dynamic agent roster
• Realtor CRM system with lead tracking (optional)
• Company Intranet (optional)
• Much more!

Contact Greg Austin for more information at 888-432-7965

This is a really strong indication that Cisco is going to target medium sized businesses for VOIP, while also using their Netgear franchise to bundle collaborative online business meetings, voice, and data with turn-key appliances. Pretty exciting stuff. Since WebEx acquired Intranets.com some time ago, it also is a new area of SAAS for Cisco. This appears to be new territory for Cisco, as they have not provided SAAS products in the past. It will be interesting to see how the products and services mesh together over time. It almost reminds me of how EBay bought Skype, and yet Skype doesn’t appear to be integrated into other Ebay offerings yet. Both acquisitions appear to be strategies for bolstering the not-so-sexy business of VOIP by adding sexy applications on top of VOIP.

Searching for Available Domain Names

There are many places on the web where you can search domain names to see what is available, and who owns the domain names that are already taken. A domain name search is called a “whois lookup”. We have a whois lookup form here. You can also find an easy to use lookup at http://www.internic.org.

How to Choose a Domain Name

As long as the web has been around, one of the most difficult and personal decisions a company must make is choosing their Internet domain name. Good, unique domain names are hard to find sometimes, especially those that end in “.com”. You may find that the “nameofyourcompany.com” is already taken by someone else, and this can be a stressful realization.

What to do when the domain name you want is already taken

• Explore buying it from a squatter – This isn’t the most attractive option, but if you really have your heart set on a domain name that is already taken, then you might be able to purchase it from the current owner. If the domain name you want is taken, then look to see if there is a web site on it. Many individuals still to this day speculate on domain names (known as squatters), and they purchase them hoping to make a profit. When there is no web site on a domain name, or when there is a simple under construction page on the site, then it may be for sale. When you do the whois on the domain name, look to see who owns it, and how they list their contact information. Sometimes it is obvious that the domain name was registered by a speculator because the name of the company that owns the domain name is listed as something like “Domain For Sale”. Beware that no two domain name squatters are the same. Some will ask for $200 for a domain name and others will want $20,000 or more. If the domain name squatter is unreasonable, then move on and don’t waste your time. The average amount I have seen them ask for is about $2000. It is a supply and demand situation, so only you can decide what you are willing to pay for a domain name. Be very careful how you purchase the domain and get something in writing or use an escrow service. There are many such services you can find using a search engine.

• Wait for the domain you want to expire – A lot of people assume that they can just wait for a domain name to expire, then scoop it up on the expiration date. After all, you can see the expiration date when you do a whois search. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. When a domain name expires, it isn’t immediately available to be purchased. Instead, it goes into a sort of “hold” status for about 45 days so that the original owner can reclaim it. Waiting for a domain name to expire is almost NEVER a good idea, especially when they are automatically being re-registered.

• Registrar Warning: Domain registrars use this hold status as an opportunity to charge domain owners a re-registration penalty fee once the original expiration date passes. How nice of them. Some registrars also prevent domain names to be moved to other registrars when they are close to their expiration date (even before they expire). Lets say that your domain name is about to expire in 20 days, and you choose to move it to another registrar. Some registrars won’t let you until you pay for ANOTHER year of registration.

• Another Registrar Warning: It is now getting MUCH harder to purchase expired domains because they are being automatically re-registered the MOMENT they are available. Almost ANY web site that has the least little bit of traffic on it is being re-registered by unscrupulous companies that use the domains for “link farms”, “splogs”, and they fill them with content from “blog scraper” content or other search links. You have probably seen one of these sites when you accidentally typed a domain name in incorrectly. A link farm is a plain-looking, small, cheesy search engine that is completely automated. Domains couldn’t be automatically re-registered to these companies unless they had inside help from registrars, and this is part of the problem with the domain name registry system today. Why does someone go through all this trouble to re-register domain names and put bogus content on them? Simple: Google and other sites pay people for link traffic. There are many stories in the news about people that do this and make a full-time living off of these junk web sites. It isn’t illegal, but it should be.

Add a hyphen to the name you want – Adding a hyphen is an easy way to find an available alternative to the name you want. Most special characters are not allowed, but hyphens are allowed.

Use an optional TLD – If the .COM suffix (known as a Top Level Domain, or TLD) is not available, many companies also choose to use “.NET” or “.US” or “.ORG” or “.INFO” or “.TV”. There are MANY more TLDs, but these that I have mentioned are the most popular. They sort of all work the same, but most of the different TLDs represent countries (.TV is an example). Some registrars charge a little more for TLDs like “.US”. Obviously, .COM is always the best choice if it is available, because most people are used to seeing them and typing them in.

Avoid .INFO – I personally do not recommend the .INFO TLD because they are used quite a bit by spammers and especially sploggers. This is because they can be purchased in bulk cheaply. Some spam filtering solutions give a stronger weight to these domains.Use your location – Sometimes adding a city or state name or abbreviation can help differentiate you from another company located somewhere else that has the same name as your company.

Trademarked Names and Words – Be careful not to use trademarks in your domain name that do not belong to you. Large law firms now employ special Internet search tools to look for infringements on trademarks that their clients own.
Service Categories – Think about the services that you offer. If your company specializes in a particular area that is specific, that might be a way to find more words to use in your domain name.

Product Names – Like service categories, if you have specific products that you wish to market on your web site, then perhaps they can be part of your domain name.
Adjectives – Think about the types of people that buy from you, and the adjectives that people use to describe the products that you sell. Also consider the advantages of your product or service. An online thesaurus can help.
Slogans (taglines) – A short tagline for you company can make a nice domain name if it is short enough.

Abbreviations and Acronyms – Many domain names that are 4-5 letters are now all taken. Every combination. But if you are one of the lucky ones that has an acronym that is still available, it could be your best domain name. But be careful about difficult acronyms. Sometimes a word is easier to remember than an acronym.

Keep Your Names Short

While it may be tempting to keep adding words to your domain name, the golden rule is to keep them as short as possible. Longer domain names DO NOT help with search engines. Search engines give little or no relevance to the words in your domain. The longer your domain name is, the harder it is for your clients to type it in. Also don’t forget that your domain name is used for branded email as well. This means that everyone who wants to email you will also have to type in your new domain name every time they type your email address.

The domain you want is available! Now what?

You need to register it. The question is, which registrar should you use? Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Enom, Delaware.Net, or who? There are hundreds of domain name registrars, and hundreds of thousands of resellers of these registrars. Delaware.Net is a reseller of TuCows, which is the most ethical and friendly registrar for hosting companies. When you register a domain name with my company, we use TuCows or another quality registrar. You still own your domain name, and resellers like us only make a dollar or two on domain name registrations. There isn’t a lot of profit (if any) in this part of the business. There are companies that I do not recommend, including GoDaddy and Enom. Enom is the provider for Domain Registry of America, which is one of those companies that sends people fake renewal invoices in the mail hoping that people will renew their domain with them accidentally. As long as Enom allows this to go on, I can’t recommend them. GoDaddy is an inexpensive domain registrar because they use (sell) your information, and they WILL target your with advertisements for their hosting services. Obviously, most hosting companies can’t recommend GoDaddy for this reason, but that is the reason why GoDaddy is a couple of dollars cheaper than other registrars (because they make up the loss by selling your information and upselling other services to you). Network Solutions is also a domain name registrar that I do not recommend. Network Solutions has the worst support, and they make it VERY hard for their customers to get information changed. They also make it very painful when you are trying to move your domains away from them to other registrars. Network Solutions is one of those companies that charges penalties when you try to move your domain name away when it is close to its expiration date. Always read the fine print of your registrar’s terms and conditions before you chose them.

Make sure you own your domain name after you pay for it

I know this title looks strange, but it is possible to purchase a domain name and still not be the owner of it. This is very rare today, but I still see this happen from time to time. Always make sure that if someone else is registering your domain name for you, that this information is accurate, and the administration contact information should be someone that will be with the organization for some time, and who is trustworthy.

When a domain name is registered, there are three areas of the registration form for contact information:

• Registrant – this is the organization that owns the domain name. Make sure that this is the legal name of your company.
• Administrative Contact – This is the person that has the authoritative rights to change the domain name information.
• Technical Contact – this contact information is usually that of the hosting company that is hosting the domain.

Again, make sure that this information is accurate ANNUALLY, and always make sure that someone at your company is the administration contact. Don’t let your web designer or hosting company be the admin contact. Also make sure it is your company’s name and address in the registrant section. If this information is not yours, then you can lose ownership of your domain name.

How many domain names should you register?

If you have a few names that you have a hard time deciding on, and you feel in your gut that they are all good choices, then register them all. Domains are inexpensive, after all, so grab a few if you think you will actually use them. Just don’t go hog-wild. I had one client that came to me after he registered 1,500 domain names, back when they were $35 each just a few years ago. That cost him $52,500 retail PER YEAR! He didn’t end up paying full price, but he had received bad advice from someone that told him registering his name a bunch of different ways would help him with search engines. If he had come to me first, I could have saved him a lot of money. He ended up wasting about $80,000 on useless domain names. I myself have about 50 domain names after being in this industry for ten years, and I actually use about half of them. Unless you are a really large company or you have lots of products that each need to be trademarked, then I would keep your domains to five or ten tops.

Reasons for Registering Multiple Domain Names

Sometimes it makes sense to register more than one domain name for your organization. Here are some instances where it makes sense:

* Ad Campaigns – When I see a domain name for a company in an advertisement that has additional information attached to it for tracking purposes, it sometimes turns me off. Sometimes I see that and I only type in the root domain. So if an add in the Wall Street Journal says “visit our web site at www.oursite.com/wsj”, I might not type in the “wsj” because I know that is just for tracking. A more clever way to track ad campaigns is to create a domain name around the ad campaign that doesn’t necessarily contain your company’s name. Keep in mind that if you have a good web analytics reporting system at your disposal, it is not necessary to register additional domains, beca

* Mailing List Domains – If you have a successful web site today without using an email mailing list, then consider yourself lucky. An email mailing list that keeps your company’s name fresh in your client’s minds is a very important part of web marketing. The down side of mailing lists is that they can sometimes be mistakenly flagged as spam, even if they are completely opt-in. There are many reasons why this can happen, and I will cover them in another article. To keep your main email safe and not blocked, it makes sense to use a separate domain name for your email campaigns. So if your domain name is someorganization.com, you could have a domain name like someorganziationnews.com to keep your business email from being blocked. Using a mailing list service is also another option that you can use to protect your main domain, but you could use your own email list domain to host an archive of your previous newsletters.

Reasons to NOT Register Multiple Domain Names

• Sub-Domains (hostnames) can sometimes work just as well – When you host your new domain name with a web site hosting company, it is possible to create additional sub-domains, AKA hostnames for free.

• Domains don’t help with search engine placement – Some people assume that their domain name choice will have a big affect on search engine ranking. This is not true. The content and popularity of your web site will have an affect on your search engine positioning, but your domain name will not. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is out of the scope of this article, but I will post more articles on this soon.

How many years should you register your domain names for?

Domain names can now be pre-registered for up to ten years. If your domain name matches the name of your business, or you are sure that you are going to keep your domain name for years to come, then I would recommend registering it for at least three years. This eliminates any chance of forgetting to renew your domain name.

Don’t lose your domain name by accident!

It IS possible to lose your domain name if the company you register it from doesn’t alert you when your domain is close to expiration. One thing that I have seen happen, is that someone will register their domain name for just one year, then they change their email address. This is a MAJOR problem for that person because registrars ONLY try to contact you by email. If you change your email address and you don’t change it on your domain name registrations, then your registrar will not be able to contact you. If one of my customers has their domain name registered with us, and it is getting close to expiration, we actually pick up the phone and try to contact them before they lose it. This is rare but it does happen. Many people assume that their hosting company is liable for their domain name renewals, and this is not the case. You are responsible for your own domain names and their renewals. It is a really good idea to put a reminder on your calendars so that you don’t miss your domain renewal anniversaries.

Good Luck!

The domain name registry system, process, and competitive landscape is getting more complex, just as web sites and email are getting more complicated. I hope that these tips help you to find the perfect domain name for your web site. If you have any questions about this article, or about domain names in general, post them here in my blog.