I have only been a web master since Jan 31 and there is so much important stuff that was never mentioned in school so excuse me for being a bit green. I'm trying to learn fast.
I just redesigned our company’s site (such a proud moment my first commercial site going live) but now I am looking for site promotion.
One thing my employer is interested in is multiple domain names we currently have 5 each one basically pointing to a different site using a .asp page and each minor site residing in a folder. He thinks that this will improve search engines finding us. I want to redirect them to sub-pages in our site. If so should each of these be submitted to SE? OR would this be similar to Spaming? Also our site is not listed on AltaVista but we get 50-100 hits by AltaVista crawlers a week. Do you think we are black listed if so why?
Our companies name is lets say BOBBY Pin (BOBBY being a general product Acronym that actually has several meanings)
Our domain name is
bobbypin.com
The domain name bobby.com gets a lot of search engine hits even though it has nothing to do with our product for example say it is DNA and we specialize in the kind that are in your genes. bobby.com might stand for Domain Name Association.
Would it be good to have that domain name? And would it help our search engine placement if we had two or again would this be considered spamming?
Also bobby.net will expire in May. Should be try to get it and if so how and then if we do get it what should we do with it?
Also would it be better if our domain was bobbypin.com or bobby-pin.com? BOBBY is sort of a recognized product acronym such as "RAM” and is our number one keyword search phrase (16%), and is our number 1 keyword at (23%)
Sarah
We were here just waiting for ya Sarah.
Plenty of question there so here are my thoughts on some of them.
Unless you find available a domain name the people might just type in you don't need multiple domain names. Concentrate on promoting one site and promote that brand online and offline.
If you insist on segmenting things you can always use directories, but you are still at least keeping the brand.
Keyword heavy domains don't mean anything (very little) with Google etc. nowadays Your better off promoting one site and getting as many links to that and spreading the page rank around it. If you can do the site without directories it would be even better.
If you do buy domains that get type in traffic, just 301 redirect (permanetly moved) that new domain to the one that you are branding.
Put that in a .htaccess file and upload it to the root directory of youre webserver.
htaccess only applies if you have apache i think, if you are on iis you don't have that option.
i think there is a LOT of benefit to be had from multiple domains, but its what you do with them rather than domain name in itself - of course a good type in can help for non-SE traffic
have a good look through the links forum here to get some ideas.
One domain name that we are very interested in (and is currently owned by a non-competitor. I estimated that if we had it, it could bring in about 100 type-ins a month. (IF it was our primary domain name it could probably bring in even more traffic)
There site is Horrible (I would say that the old white castle site was better) and has poor standing on SEs.
we called them up(as did a few of our competitors and he said the domain was not for sell (or if it was say a million dollars) I think we approached the whole thing wrong. Would this guy be so daft that he would turn down a good offer, and what would a good offer be? And most importantly, since he turn down us once with a very blatant NO, would it be ethical to ask again?
(if we really want the site) I think since we have the advantage of location(he just so happens to be 45 min away where most of are competitors are a plane trip away) we should meet him face to face over dinner since it would be harder for him to walk away from a meal then to hang up the phone. Then throw him a pith that would be something like "Selling the domain name to us would benefit your company in this way" instead of just "We will give you $XXXX.XX for your domain." Maybe find a new domain for him, design a new site, and maybe even through in a new corporate image complete with, business cards, logo(they currently have no logo to speak of unless you include a html frame with the initials and name in it), and letter head.
oh and design a new site for them wouldn't cost our comp that much... lets put it this way.. if I suddenly made double min wage... I would be tickled to death, and if they offered me double min wage with benefits... I'd probably faint.
