by Darren on February 18, 2012
With the available pool of unregistered domain names getting ever smaller a lot of new businesses end up going with longer names or decide to use one of the newer domain name extensions.
I’ve already covered why you should stick with the most commonplace extensions, and having a long domain name has its own set of drawbacks including looking spammy and being difficult for customers to remember and type in.
One of Google’s internal website quality guidelines specifically mentioned long domains with lots of hyphens as a signal that a website may be spammy or low value so it’s best to avoid them.
What option do you have then?
Well, why not consider buying a premium domain name?
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by Darren on February 14, 2012
Forced Registration Is Bad
One question that gets asked regularly is should you make customers register for an account on your website before making a purchase?
There have been lots of studies and testing into this and the outcomes are pretty conclusive, yet so many sites still get it wrong!
The short answer is that in most cases you should not force potential customers to register before making a purchase, here are the reasons why:
1. Long Forms Turn People Off
Just like in the real world, when someone is confronted with a form asking for lots of details most people are turned off.
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by Darren on February 10, 2012
Despite the fact that Google has been running its AdWords program for over 10 years now, some people still struggle to understand exactly what it is and how it works.
Read on for an overview of Google AdWords and how it plays a massive part in the online advertising world.
History of AdWords
Google started life as a search engine, it scanned the Internet and built up a database of websites that it discovered, it then used sophisticated computer algorithms to rank these sites based on a variety of factors for different keywords and phrases.
This allowed anybody to go to Google, perform a search and return a list of sites which matched their search terms.
This functionality is great for end users however businesses that didn’t end up at the top of the search results received hardly any visitors from Google. This eventually led to the search engine optimisation field developing with people attempting to artificially ‘push’ sites up the rankings.
Google saw an opportunity to insert paid adverts around the normal search results for which it could charge businesses, AdWords was born.
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With the available pool of unregistered domain names getting ever smaller a lot of new businesses end up going with longer names or decide to use one of the newer domain name extensions.