The first thing most people do when they need to get a domain name to set up a new website for their business is to look and see if they can get their exact business name. So

if they own a business called Vegetables R Us they’ll try for VegetablesRUs.com.

But is this the smartest way to go? It’s not if they want to make the most of getting plenty of search engine traffic – and let’s face it, most of us would like to get as much traffic from the likes of Google, Yahoo and others as we can.

So what’s the solution? Simple – opt for a generic domain name instead of your business name. A generic domain name is one that describes your business rather than naming it. One of the best examples in the UK is the DIY store B&Q. Now if they had bought their own business name as a domain, they’d have something like BandQ.com. It’s a bit clumsy but it also doesn’t describe what they do. But they didn’t do that. Instead they chose DIY.com, which must surely now be worth a fortune. B&Q gets five million searches a month in Google, so it is hardly unsuccessful. But DIY gets more than ELEVEN million searches a month – more than double their actual business name.

What does this mean for you if you’re looking to buy a domain name? It simply means that a generic domain name will provide you with more opportunities to pick up more traffic from the search engines. The chances are your business is not as well known as B&Q, so it is unlikely that you will have the power of a well known business name or brand behind you. This means you have to employ all the techniques you can to get as much traffic to your site as you can – and choosing a generic domain name can help enormously in this respect.

So what are some of the main advantages you’ll benefit from if you get a generic domain name for your website?

You can seize the opportunity to grab people who haven’t made a brand decision yet

Some people go online with the specific desire to find a brand named company to buy from. But a lot of people aren’t in this position and they are willing to look around to see which company might suit them the best.

If you create custom mouse mats for computers and you call your company – and website – Mousetastic, you’ll only get traffic for that domain if people have heard of you. It will take a very long time to generate traffic through good and consistent SEO friendly content on your pages.

But if you set up a domain such as CustomMouseMats.com or something similar, you can start getting traffic very quickly. Anyone who is searching for custom mouse mats is very likely to come across your website, and if they like what they see they will consider coming to you to make a purchase.

It will be easier to rank more highly for the phrase you choose

This has been borne out by the above example. Choosing a generic name immediately improves your chances of ranking more highly for that term. It could be anything relevant to your business – soft toys, kitchen utensils, garden fences or anything else. The truth is that if someone types in kitchen utensils and you happen to own a website which has that exact phrase in the domain name, the search engines are going to recognise that. And they’re going to rank you more highly as a result.

You can achieve more on a much lower advertising budget

Trying to make a brand a household name is a hugely expensive task, and one that only the big name companies can afford to take on. If you are going to win a lot of business online and grow your own business into a successful one, you have to do it on a smaller budget.

The good news is that if you opt for a generic domain name over a brand name you stand a much bigger chance of doing this. Once your domain name starts to age and develop with good content on it, you will see it start to rise higher in the search engine rankings. It is much easier to achieve better results with a generic name than with a brand name that few people will be familiar with.

Generic domains can generate a lot more traffic than branded domains

We’ve already seen that an unknown brand name domain can struggle to achieve good rankings in the search engines. If a site is badly ranked, it will never gain a lot of traffic. This is because people rarely go beyond the first one or two pages of the search results.

But if you have a generic domain name it is easier to get it higher in the results, precisely because of the term you have chosen. No one quite knows how the search engine algorithms work. But it is fair to say that if someone searches for green vegetables for cooking and you happen to own a site called GreenVegetablesforCooking.com, your site stands a very good chance of ranking highly in those results. This is because it is relevant to the search that has been made. Providing your pages contain relevant content as well (which they should) they will do well in the search results and bring you more traffic.

Clearly it is worth choosing a good generic domain name to help strengthen your online business offering. This is true even if you already have a brand name website you are using. You can buy a generic name and link that domain to your existing website to benefit from even more traffic. Generic domains are always capable of achieving good results for your business, so make sure you buy one that is going to work for you from today onwards.

tions.
Like many other ccTLDs, in the early days of Internet, it was originally delegated to an individual by Jonathan Postel (an American computer scientist who has made numerous important contributions to the development of the Internet, specially regarding its standards).
In time, it passed to Dr Willie Black from the UK Education and Research Networking Association. Domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and forwarded to the UK Naming Committee before being processed by UKERNA.

The Naming Committee was at the time organised as a mailing list to which all proposed names were circulated. The members considered those proposals under a ruleset that was insisting that domain names should be very close or identical to a registered business name of the registrant. Any name could be objected to, and if only a small number of objections were received, the name would be refused. Also, there was a restriction that a company can have only a single domain name.

By the middle of the 1990s the growth of the Internet, and the arrival of the World Wide Web was pushing domain name registrations requests up to levels unmanageable by a group of part-time voluntary managers. Oliver Smith (Demon Internet) forced the issue by providing the committee with a variety of automated tools, which formalised and automated the naming process. This allowed a lot more registrations to be processed more reliably and quickly, and inspired different individuals to explore more resourceful approaches to domain name registration.

Different plans were put forward for the possible domain management, and Dr Black stepped up with a daring proposal for a not-for-profit commercial entity to properly deal with the .uk domain. Although commercial interests initially hesitated at this, Nominet UK was formed to be the .uk Network Information Centre, and it continues this role to this day.

Nominet UK began registering domain names in August 1996 and today is officially recognised by the UK Government as the manager of the .uk TLD. Registering a domain name directly with Nominet UK is possible, but it is quicker and cheaper to register it via a Nominet tag holder.

Some of the earliest domain name registrations (even before the creation of Nominet UK)
include:
mod.uk (Ministry of Defence)
parliament.uk (UK Parliament)
british-library.uk (The British Library)
nls.uk (The National Library of Scotland)
nhs.uk (The National Health Service)
Today, the .uk top level domain is separated into a variety of second level domains (SLD). Registering a domain name within the SLD should correspond to the type of the activity of the registrant.

For example: .co.uk for commercial enterprises, .org.uk for non-commercial organisations, .me.uk for personal domains, .ltd.uk and .plc.uk for registered company names, .net.uk for Internet Service Providers, .ac.uk for academic societies, .gov.uk for government bodies, etc.
Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominet_UK
3. http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/background/history/

Rich Text Area Toolbar Bold (Ctrl + B) Italic (Ctrl + I) Strikethrough (Alt + Shift + D) Unordered list (Alt + Shift + U) Ordered list (Alt + Shift + O) Blockquote (Alt + Shift + Q) Align Left (Alt + Shift + L) Align Center (Alt + Shift + C) Align Right (Alt + Shift + R) Insert/edit link (Alt + Shift + A) Unlink (Alt + Shift + S) Insert More Tag (Alt + Shift + T) Toggle spellchecker (Alt + Shift + N) ▼ Toggle fullscreen mode (Alt + Shift + G) Show/Hide Kitchen Sink (Alt + Shift + Z) Newsletter Functions Format – Paragraph Paragraph ▼ Underline Align Full (Alt + Shift + J) Select text color ▼ Paste as Plain Text Paste from Word Remove formatting Insert custom character Outdent Indent Undo (Ctrl + Z) Redo (Ctrl + Y) Help (Alt + Shift + H) According to various reliable sources, as of April 2010 .uk (UK’s Internet country code top-level domain – ccTLD) is the fourth most popular top-level domain in the world (right after .com, .de, and .net), and has over 8.6 million registrations. Like many other ccTLDs, in the early days of Internet, it was originally delegated to an individual by Jonathan Postel (an American computer scientist who has made numerous important contributions to the development of the Internet, specially regarding its standards). In time, it passed to Dr Willie Black from the UK Education and Research Networking Association. Domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and forwarded to the UK Naming Committee before being processed by UKERNA. The Naming Committee was at the time organised as a mailing list to which all proposed names were circulated. The members considered those proposals under a ruleset that was insisting that domain names should be very close or identical to a registered business name of the registrant. Any name could be objected to, and if only a small number of objections were received, the name would be refused. Also, there was a restriction that a company can have only a single domain name. By the middle of the 1990s the growth of the Internet, and the arrival of the World Wide Web was pushing domain name registrations requests up to levels unmanageable by a group of part-time voluntary managers. Oliver Smith (Demon Internet) forced the issue by providing the committee with a variety of automated tools, which formalised and automated the naming process. This allowed a lot more registrations to be processed more reliably and quickly, and inspired different individuals to explore more resourceful approaches to domain name registration. Different plans were put forward for the possible domain management, and Dr Black stepped up with a daring proposal for a not-for-profit commercial entity to properly deal with the .uk domain. Although commercial interests initially hesitated at this, Nominet UK was formed to be the .uk Network Information Centre, and it continues this role to this day. Nominet UK began registering domain names in August 1996 and today is officially recognised by the UK Government as the manager of the .uk TLD. Registering a domain name directly with Nominet UK is possible, but it is quicker and cheaper to register it via a Nominet tag holder. Some of the earliest domain name registrations (even before the creation of Nominet UK) include: mod.uk (Ministry of Defence) parliament.uk (UK Parliament) british-library.uk (The British Library) nls.uk (The National Library of Scotland) nhs.uk (The National Health Service) Today, the .uk top level domain is separated into a variety of second level domains (SLD). Registering a domain name within the SLD should correspond to the type of the activity of the registrant. For example: .co.uk for commercial enterprises, .org.uk for non-commercial organisations, .me.uk for personal domains, .ltd.uk and .plc.uk for registered company names, .net.uk for Internet Service Providers, .ac.uk for academic societies, .gov.uk for government bodies, etc. Sources: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominet_UK 3. http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/background/history/ Path : p

Unconventionally, today we live in the era of science; where the mark

eting is no more restricted to just an advert in local newspaper or a notice on the corner shop. Marketing also includes making use of current technologies e.g. media to promote the brand but also making it easy access brand for the customers.

Marketing strategies in 21st century are highly shifted towards online marketing; where consumers are getting more and more interested in using the internet and intranet services. These internet and intranet services provide no boundaries for the consumers to make use of. Some of the examples could include email, browsing, banking, shopping etc.

While we talk about marketing and their importance in the era of internet, domain names have an importance which comes as a core value for any business. Relating your business to a particular domain name / web address is very important as this would be the address which would lead the customers to come to your website to use it for your business or whatever purpose you want it to be used. Weather its just a service provision of simple email service, or its a shopping website where you may sell the stuff online domain name is the key for any business to promote in order to attract the customers.

Making people remember your domain name could be a tricky task. If its harder-to-remember domain name, it would be hard to market it and there would be less chances of people accessing it. If its easy-to-remember domain name people may remember it easily and access it whenever they need the service.

A simple analogy could be making someone remember your telephone number. If a telephone number consists of particular digits or sequence of numbers it would be easy to remember e.g. 123123123. However if you have a telephone number say 395360291 its hard to remember even it consists same number of digits.

Same analogy could be used for the domain names. If a domain name is generic and easy, people would remember it. If its hard people may find it difficult to remember.

It could be illustrated with a simple example. Say, someone is running a business of selling cars and wants to promote his business via website. If he buys a domain name which is not generic say www.stegaoreyen.com, it would be hard to market it as no one would remember it.
However with a domain name of generic in nature, e.g. www.buycars.com people would remember it and it would make the brand marketing much easy and efficient.

Similarly while we talk about obtaining a generic domain name, its not necessary that one go for very common words/phrases to obtain a domain name as someone might have already obtained it. Generic doesn’t necessarily mean common words, but generic also means easy to remember. For an example, the biggest online search giant www.google.com. No one knew what Google is. However it was generic in nature as it was easy to remember, it became one of the biggest search giants on internet.

Thus, for any business or personal use, the domain name has a crucial importance which cannot be neglected. A generic domain name could lead a business to success and when there is a need to buy a web address domain name, its always worth buying a generic domain name so that it may make the brand marketing much easy, and make the people use the generic domain name to get the services being delivered.