Website Marketing

Web addresses can be compared to buying property, it’s about position, position and yes, position. You do, to a large extent, determine your neighbours. To be the most visible you need to own all the addresses in your suburb.

Main tips:

• Register your key URL, and then as many related web addresses as you can.
• Think like your customer and how they would look for your product. They may use more generic terms, product categories or related topics. Register these addresses.
• Register the brand names of products you sell.

That for several reasons:

• Buying up the related addresses keeps the competition at arms length.
• Sites built on these addresses can be optimised for search engines and then used to feed into the main site.
• Related web sites can also be expanded on and become websites in their own right.

With more sites relevant to your your customer you have more chance of having more sites listed in more search engines. Even if your main site is not listed your feeder sites will be and that increases the chances of people finding you. In an ideal world your sites could occupy several top positions on search listings and squeeze the competition out.

Related addresses example:

• Say you sold hardware equipment and your main site was hardwareshop.co.za
• Related addresses could include diy.co.za, handyman.co.za, drill.co.za, sander.co.za, braai.co.za, paint.co.za… etc.

One of the main factors resulting in your site making it to the top of the list in a search engine is by the website address (though not guaranteed). Second to that is optimising meta key words, description,  links to related sites and page content. Web site optimisation is a science all on it’s own and requires a lot more information than given here.

In conclusion:

Own the web real estate and keep the competition out. In South Africa you will be surprised at how many web address names are available for purchase.

General information:

To check the availability of SA web addresses go to http://whois.co.za.

Hosting companies also provide facilities to check available names and on more than one domain type, e.g. .com, .co.za, .org, .net etc. They also have the tools so that you can register via their website.

The cost to register a .co.za web address is around R100.00, an annual fee, less than the registration fee, is required to keep the domain name registered to you for each year thereafter.