You don’t need the DOT com for domination in website promotion

December 8th, 2006 by Will Scott

I just had an interesting conversation in which I was reminded of how sad it must be to be a domain squatter.

It is true that you can more easily attain good ranking if you have a domain name which matches your key phrases, but what if you bought a domain a few years back and have been sitting on it because of some perceived value and you suddenly learn… it has none!

Sad, I tell you.

Everything is better with examples and here’s mine for this one:

We were building and promoting a site for a New Orleans chiropractor. We thought all the good domains would be taken, but amazingly they were not – we were able to get hold of neworleanschiropractic.net and neworleanschiropractor.net (note: these are not the ‘.com’).

While not the .com, they are incredibly key phrase relevant.

We did a a little key phrase research and determined that “new orleans chiropractic” was getting about 8x the search traffic of “new orleans chiropractor” and therefore deployed a site on neworleanschiropractic.net. Since the domain was such a good match for the phrase we were quickly ranking for our chosen search phrase. We were lagging for our second phrase “new orleans chiropractor” and decided to take some aggressive measures.

A lot of links, a few article submissions and a few months later I’m happy to say our website promotion efforts have paid off. www.neworleanschiropractic.net is #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN for the phrases “new orleans chiropractor” and “new orleans chiropractic“. And, we’re starting to pick up traffic for variations on the theme as well.

Content, links and time are a surefire recipe for market domination by way of website promotion.

A great domain helps, but you definitely don’t need the .com to dominate. And, if you’re sitting on a bunch of them just hoping your day will come you may be sad when someone eats your lunch based on good ol’ fashioned content and links.