Why Don’t You Include a “Free” Domain Name?

Many companies will offer you a “free” domain as long as you keep using their services. We do not do that as quite simply your domain name is the single most important online asset you have and you should maintain direct control over it. I generally keep my domains and hosting with different people, but I always keep the domains unbundled. It costs less than £3 per year for your domain, so it seems like a small price to pay for this security.

Now before I go on, I must point out that most companies that bundle a domain name in with are perfectly legitimate and will let you take control of your domain name should you want to move. However there are other issues as unless you can replicate the site exactly, this will cause you issues.

OK, I am going to get a little technical here as it helps to understand why your domain name is important and why your site layout is important too, so if you are a little techno-phobic, you can simply skip through to the bit at the end when I explain what to do and ignore the whats, wheres and whyfores. Don’t worry, I will make it very clear where this bit ends so you can skip past if feel narcoleptic at the thought of it….if you do embark on reading it, I’d make a cup of tea before you start!

OK, got your cup of tea? Good, let’s begin….Google’s algorithm uses several measures to determine where to rank you, but essentially these fall into 2 main areas, what are termed on-site (sometimes called on-page) and off-site. The most famous part of the Google algorithm relates to the use of off-site metrics by way of links to your site, which is why we are concerned with keeping control of your domain name and the structure of your site.

Now, to explain how a link works I’ll need to explain the basics of a link. If you are familiar with this, feel free to skip this paragraph, but when someone links to your site it will look something like this Tulett.com are wonderful web designers. Within this are several elements, but the most important is the page that the link points to, in this case it is our home page. The next element is what is called the anchor text, which in this case is “Tulett.com are wonderful web designers” and this essentially tells you what the page is about.

So when Google finds one of these it takes it as a vote for the page it links to, but Google has realised that not all links are created equal.

Google looks at these to see where they came from (the authority and relevance of a page – so if you got a link from the main coaching body, it carries lots of weight as it is both relevant and important in the world of coaching, whereas a link from a brand new blog about cycling would carry very little weight) This is how Google knows that sites like Amazon have nothing to do with rainforests, but selling books etc. (As you can see from this, if you get a good link to your site, then change your domain name, you lose this recommendation. This should be part of any promotion strategy in future, which means that the domain name you promote becomes ever more valuable to you, so make sure you keep control of it!)

However smaller, newer sites will not have much information, so Google uses the information contained on the site itself, the on-site metrics. Since alicecoaching.co.uk has been around for a little while with content on coaching on it, Google already knows what this site is about and it has aged a little. As a secondary benefit, the main keyword groups you are going to be targeting (keywords are the words typed into Google to get a set of results) are coaching related, so having this in your domain name also helps (the words like “career” & “careers” will be associated far more with job sites, a big and popular market so targeting those will be harder and potentially less beneficial as not directly related to what you do – not a good combination!)

You may think I am being a little Google-centric about this, but what people type in tells you how they think about it and the words they use, hence allows you to use their language, making them more responsive to you as well as putting your site where they can find you. The classic example used is South West airlines in the US. They are a discount airline and for years they branded themselves as “inexpensive” and would not let any of their communications use words like “cheap”…this was until someone pointed out that the number of searches each month for “cheap flights” etc was in the tens of thousands and pretty much no-one typed in “inexpensive flights” and when their pages did show up, they got very poor click through rates – they changed policy and their online bookings rocketed.

There are countless other examples of this, but I find it is very useful to go through this and target each page to a set group of keywords as you know this is what people are looking for and if you offer it, you want to make sure they know about it! It also gives a good indication on how to set up your site, but I will go into this more later…I bet you cannot wait!