1. Brainstorm top keyword choices
   Write down your top 5 or so key business keywords.  Start adding simple prefixes and suffixes to your keywords.  For example if you are a dentist who specializes in cosmetic dentistry procedures your keywords could be something like this: dentist, cosmetic dentist, cosmetic dentistry, and smiles.  Now you are going to want to take your geographic location and incorporate that into your keyword choices. For example, if you are located in San Francisco your domain choices now look something like this: SanFranciscoDentist.com, SanFranciscoCosmeticDentist.com and so on.  Just fool around with them until you find an available domain name.
2. Make Sure your Domain Name is Unique
   If you don’t do your market research before choosing a domain name you can end up with a gigantic mess on your hands.  For instance, if there is a dental practice with the domain name SanFranciscoDentalCare.com you don’t want to get the domain name DentalCareSanFrancisco.com.  When someone is telling you to visit their website unless they type in the URL, the search results can bring back your competition’s website instead of yours. Make sure to research your market before settling on a domain name.
3. Only Purchase a Dot-Com if Available
   Even though i showed you above that there are numerous gTLD domain names, the Dot-Com is always your best bet.  It is most widely recognized by almost everyone.  Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live usually do not weight your domain selection as long as it is a gTLD.  The advantage to selecting a Dot-Com is that almost every person assumes when you tell them a web address that it is a Dot-Com and you could be sending very valuable traffic to your competition.  When in doubt purchase the Dot-Com and your secondary selection.  Set-up a 301 redirect to your secondary domain name if you would like.  A fine example of this is Wikipedia.  Go type in Wikipedia.com and you will notice you will be redirected to Wikipedia.org.
4. Make Your URL Easy To Type
   If your customers and clients cannot spell or remember your domain name then your marketing efforts are failing.  URLs should be memorable and easy to type.  It is stated that the letters to avoid are “q, z, x, c and p”.  The reason that these letters are said to be excluded from the domain names is due to their placement on the keyboards.
5. Make it Memorable
   Both word of mouth and dominance marketing rely on having your domain name be easy to remember and capitalizing on keywords in your URL.  Make it rhyme, alliterations, play-on-words, just KIS (Keep it Simple).  Just remember that this is your online identity and will be used in your print collateral and on practice signage.
6. Keep the URL as Short As You Can
   The industry number that I have been hearing is 25 characters excluding your suffix.  Try not to exceed that limit for numerous reasons, the URLs get harder to remember and the harder to fit on business cards, letterhead, etc.  In the dental world you want your URL to be as short as you can but still contain valuable keywords, such as location and occupation.
7. Set and Meet Goals and Expectations
   When you tell someone to go visit your website, you do not want to disappoint them.  If they can guess what contents your website has before ever visiting it then you have successfully completed your goal.  Try not to mislead them.  By meeting this goal you will need far less branding for people to recognize the URL.
8. Avoid Copyright Violations & Infringements
   Just take a look at copyright.gov before you purchase your domain name.  This is so you don’t get sued and loose all the hard time, work, and money vested into your website.  It is a simple thing to do that can save you a ton of heartache down the road.
9. Set Yourself Apart With Your Brand
   You can use a unique nickname or alias for your website like WebMD.com or FreeCreditReport.com.  They accomplish the goal of letting your audience know what it is you do with out them ever having to visit your website.  Dental examples like ‘VailVeneers.com’ or ‘CelebrityDentist.com’ are great URLS since they let your audience know exactly what procedures and service areas your cater towards.
10. Exclude Hyphens and Numbers
    When you add hyphens and numbers to a domain name it makes the domain name very hard to verbally say and remember.  There are always exceptions to this rule like ‘1800Dentist.com’, that URL is also their company name and is exceptionally simple to remember.  Even though you can still optimize the websites, hyphens add a whole level of complexity since you have to tell some one that your website is San Francisco Hyphen Dentist dot com.
11. Don’t Follow Latest Fads and Trends
    Try to stay away from the latest trends like odd misspellings, using words like top, best, hot, my, free, etc.  Even though there are numerous well optimized that contain two hyphens like www.dental–implants.com.  I would not recommend ever using a domain name that contains 1, let alone 2 hypens.  They are very hard to remember and say, and in the SERP results they just look plain wierd.
12. Research Available Domains Using the Latest Tools
    AJAX domain selection tools are the latest and greatest as far as saving time.  They instantly will let you know if a domain name is available everytime you enter a new character. Take a look at the ones below.

• AJAX Who Is
• Domjax

Tags: Dental Marketing, Domain Names

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Dental Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.