Monday 5 May 2008

Did I choose the right domain name?

A fellow software author tells me we’ve chosen the wrong domain names for the sites selling our products. He says we should have chosen domain names with the product (not company) name in them. I’ve heard this advice before and did consider it when choosing a domain name.

From my point of view, the problem with choosing a product-specific domain name is that it could reduce my options in the future. At the moment I sell one software product but within the next 6 months will be launching 2 more. If I were to have a separate domain selling each product I don’t think I’d have the time or energy to do the link-building. It’s pretty time-consuming doing link-building for one site less alone 2 or 3. On the other hand if I’d chosen a product-specific domain name to begin with, selling different products on the one, original site might not look right.

I used to think the domain name was very important but if you read around, it turns out that URLs are considered more important (and the domain is a specific case of a URL). With a good linking strategy within your site, inner pages can benefit from links to the homepage, e.g. several of my inner pages have a PR only 1 less than the homepage even though they have no links from external sites. These inner pages are often landing pages in searches. So as I sell different products and services I can create pages within my site, like:

http://www.sliqtools.co.uk/invoice-software.aspx
http://www.sliqtools.co.uk/invoice-templates.aspx

and so on.

All in all, I’m pretty happing with my choice of domain name and will continue to build links to one site and, for the time being, mostly to one page – my homepage.

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