Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Buying the Right Domain Name - Part One
By Tom Ogg

Today, when you are thinking about starting a business or building a website, the most important thing to consider is the domain name that you are going to use. Your domain name should be the name of your business and vice versa. One of the most important considerations is the type of website that you are going to develop and how people are going to find it.

Travel agents may be developing a local site to serve their client base and their referrals, a niche keyword site that might be dependent on search engines for traffic or a community site either on a local, regional or national scale. In each case the domain name must perfectly define the website’s functionality, be easy to remember and be easily found by the search engines.

Defining the purpose of your site is critical to getting the right domain name. Understanding how you are going to market the site is also quite important. As an example, let’s say that you want to build a site to market cruises in the San Diego County area using Google AdWords to market in the 920 – 921 zips codes only. SanDiegoCruiseExpert.com or SanDiegoCruiseSpecialist.com might be excellent choices for your domain name.

For the most part, the best domain names may already be taken and may be actively for sale, or possibly the owner is open to an offer. Each domain name is a unique, one-of-a-kind name and may be well worth thousands of dollars in potential organic traffic, branding and overall image.

Here are considerations for selecting the right domain name for your site.

Start With Keywords: Once you have defined the specific objective of your site, use Google’s Keyword Tool to identify the most attractive keywords that you might use in a domain name. As an example, I used the above domain names and found that there were an average of 33,100 local monthly searches using the keywords “San Diego Cruises” and 40,500 local searches for “San Diego Vacation”. Finding this out, I might change my url to SanDiegoVacationCruises.com to cash in on over 70,000 local searches where I might be able to gain a high local ranking in the search engines and my AdWords campaign will be highly focused.

.Com is King: In every instance, you should only use a .com extension for your domain name. Even the iPhone has a .com button to save users from having to keyboard it. The only time you would use a different extension is if you couldn’t care less about command line traffic, branding or you have such a unique concept that people will find you no matter what. Craigslist.org is an excellent example of that.

Make it Memorable: Your domain name should be easy to remember. Let’s say that you are putting a website up to sell travel insurance as an adjunct to your travel site. To capture the interest of search engines the url “TravelInsuranceAgency.com” would be an ideal domain name in all respects. If you specialize in selling Disney Cruises then a url such as “MickeysCruise.com” would be an excellent choice. While Disney has stringent control over their registered brands, this skirts the issue, is very memorable and entertaining.

Keep It Short and To the Point: Your domain name should be no more than three words, with two words even better. It should shout the very essence of your value proposition. Avoid words that do not add to your keyword search or memorable characteristics such as The, My, Your and such. Also, be sure that your domain name is easy to keyboard. Avoid hyphenated keyword urls and always opt for the keyword domain names that are connected without hyphens.

Make Sure it Defines Your Business: TomtheTravelAgent.com really doesn’t tell anyone anything other than Tom is a travel agent. HawaiiReviews.com tells you everything about that will reside at the website. Also, avoid abbreviations. Tom4Travel.com, TomforTvl.com, Tom4Travels.com are all not going to work because TomforTravel.com is the default url that folks will enter to find you if that is your url. When folks find your website, make sure that it is highly relevant to your url. If HawaiiReviews.com’s landing page is for discount airfares, then there is a complete disconnect with the visitor’s expectations and the actual content that resides upon the site.

Be Sure That Your Email Addresses Sell: RequestaQuote@TravelInsuranceAgency.com pretty much says it all. Your domain name opens up a huge opportunity for you to market several niches that you might serve. AMASpecialist@RiverBoatsandBarges.com pretty much says it all. Use Email addresses to both market your site and motivate people to take action.

Buying Your Domain Name: Unfortunately, just about all of the 2 and three word domain names are already taken. Next month we will explore exactly how to buy the perfect domain anme on the open market without paying top dollar for it.