How to choose a marketable (and searchable) domain name

How to choose a marketable (and searchable) domain name by Larry Alton.  Available from <http://www.cio.com/article/3153005/marketing/how-to-choose-a-marketable-and-searchable-domain-name.html> [JAN 4, 2017 5:00 AM PT]

Choosing a domain name for your company, a marketing campaign or a specific product isn’t always an easy process. There’s a lot to consider and you have to make sure you’re taking every important aspect into account. Ultimately, you want to end up with a domain name that’s marketable and SEO-friendly.

Why do domain names matter?

Does a domain name really matter? This is a question that gets thrown around a lot. Despite all the tiptoeing around the subject, the answer is actually quite clear. Yes, domain names matter. They really, really matter.

Think of your website like a house. While you may spend time in a lot of different places, you ultimately spend the majority of your time at home. It’s the only little piece of the world that you own and can do with as you please.

Using the analogy, you may have social media profiles, pay-per-click ads, guest blogging entries and a long list of other aspects, but your website is the only one you truly own and manage.

Facebook could suddenly decide that they no longer like your profile and delete it. Google could remove your ads with no rhyme or reason. While it’s highly unlikely that they would do this, it’s completely within their rights. Your website, on the other hand, is owned and controlled by you. This makes it your greatest digital asset.

But what good is a home without an address? Let’s say you just moved into a new house on the far side of town and want to invite your friends over. Sure, you could give them a long list of written directions and hope they eventually find their way to your house — but that’s not practical in today’s day and age. They need a street address to identify the house without any issues.

A domain name is to a website what a street address is to a house. It’s how people find and identify the website. But in addition to serving as an identifier, the domain name also serves as a descriptor. So, you could argue that it’s twice as important as a street address.

The two key aspects of a successful domain name

If a domain name is that important, then it stands to reason that you should be spending a lot of time brainstorming and strategically developing the right one. But in your pursuit of coming up with the right domain name — something that’s becoming increasingly difficult as thousands of names are swiped up each day — make sure you’re focusing on the two key aspects that really matter:

  • Marketable. First and foremost, your domain name must be marketable. It must connect with your target demographic and properly reflect what your brand stands for.
  • Searchable. Secondly, a successful domain name must be searchable. This means you need to take SEO principles into account and choose a domain name that allows you to maximize search engine performance.

If you can nail these two key aspects, then you’ve done your job. Having a domain name that’s both marketable and searchable will take you a long way.

6 tips for developing an effective domain name

But what you really want to know is how. How do you develop a successful domain name that’s both marketable and searchable? Well, let’s take a look at some tips and best practices.

1. Brevity is preferred

It all starts with brevity. As web developer Robert Mening says, “Short, punchy and clear domain names are much easier to remember. If your domain name is too fuzzy, too long or spelled in a strange way, visitors may forget it.”

This is why one-word domain names are preferred, yet expensive and rare to come by in today’s marketplace. More than likely, you’ll have to go with a two-word domain (which is fine). Just make sure there aren’t an abnormally high number of characters.

2. Make it memorable

How many times have you visited a website that you’ve never been to before, found something of value, and then forgotten the name of the website a few hours later? While there’s a thing called your “internet history” that will allow you to eventually find the site again, are you really going to go through all that trouble?

This is why developing a memorable domain name that can be easily recalled by visitors is very important. It can mean the difference between losing people after they leave your site and gaining repeat visitors.

3. Relatable and intuitive

“If you believe that a member of your target audience could immediately associate the domain name with a good guess of what they think you do, that is a big positive,” explains Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz. “Meaning they could look at your domain name and say, ‘Oh, I’m guessing they probably do this. This is probably what that company is up to.’”

The more intuitive a domain name is, the more likely that you’ll attract organic search engine traffic from people who have no familiarity with your brand.

4. Keyword rich

Remember that you want your domain name to be searchable. Well, part of making a URL SEO-friendly involves leveraging specific keywords.

While it’s good to include keywords if they naturally fit into your domain name, don’t go out of your way to include additional words or phrases just because they’re a good SEO fit. It’s way more important to focus on marketability and brevity.

5. Ensure it’s protectable

Just because a domain name is available doesn’t mean you can use it.  “If you choose a domain name that conflicts with any one of the millions of commercial names that already exist, you risk losing it,” attorney Diana Fitzpatrick says. “And if you’ve put money and sweat into marketing your website and then are forced to give the domain name up, your web-based business is likely to suffer a damaging, if not fatal, blow.”

The moral of the story is do your due diligence and ensure the domain name is protectable. If need be, meet with an attorney who specializes in trademarks. This could save you a lot of pain (and money) down the road.

6. Avoid trendy spellings

The final tip is to avoid trending spellings. Because it’s very hard to find the exact domain name you want, you’ll see many businesses and entrepreneurs take off a letter, purposefully misspell a word, change an “s” to a “z”, or use any number of other techniques to secure a domain name that they feel is right. Don’t do this. Trendy spellings will come back to bite you and ultimately cheapen your brand.

Invest in your domain name

There are plenty of domain names that can still be purchased for $0.99 when you sign up for a hosting plan with specific providers. And while there’s nothing wrong with these, they tend to be obscure domains or three- or four-word URLs.

At the end of the day, you’re probably going to have to spend some money to get a domain name that’s both marketable and searchable. It could be a few hundred dollars, or it could be thousands of dollars. You’ll have to make a decision as to how much you can realistically spend. However, know that the ROI on quality domain names is quite high.

Invest in a good domain name today and reap the rewards tomorrow.

How to choose a marketable (and searchable) domain name by Larry Alton.  Available from <http://www.cio.com/article/3153005/marketing/how-to-choose-a-marketable-and-searchable-domain-name.html> [JAN 4, 2017 5:00 AM PT]

5 Crispy SEO Tips for E-Commerce Websites

5 Crispy SEO Tips for E-Commerce Websites by Techniblogic.  Available from <http://techniblogic.com/5-crispy-seo-tips-for-e-commerce-websites/#> [Dec 29, 2016]

Overall, the rules of SEO are not different from one site to another, but here, an e-commerce site has specificities. Some are beneficial, others may be disabled. Let’s see some mistakes to avoid and actions to optimize the positioning of an online store.

  • An online store has a distinct advantage over many other types of sites, it will help generate many specific pages since in general, and there is one page per product sold. A boon to the referrer.
  • However, this advantage can turn into a nightmare for several reasons. The two large black spots being the risk of duplicate content with other sites, and the lack of optimized pages for generic terms.
Optimize its product detail pages

It is common to find online shops on which the content of pages of product detail is an exact recovery of the photo and text description provided by the manufacturer. Same punishment for the title product.

Why Google should he proposes on its first page of results 10 times the same content on 10 different sites? On the contrary, he does everything to avoid this scenario and does not place in this case AS sites whose pages are authoritative.

To overcome this problem, writing a unique title and a single description is almost indispensable. To go further and take no risk, you can even create a second description that will be transmitted only to shopping engines.

Optimize pages of headings

That contains the pages of entry in most e-commerce sites? A series of inserts which are excerpts products that allow visitors to choose the category presented. Not easy in terms of its position the site in Google’s results on the class titles.

Yet these more generic queries are often those typed by users!

An effective solution is to write an introduction optimized for each page of entries. It then offers a true Google optimized textual content with whom he will love and your page will be favored in comparison with those of your competitors.

Beware, if your pages Topics include a paging, do not post this textual THAT on the first page, to avoid the risk of duplicate content.

Create themed pages

Your traditional pages are perhaps not sufficient to position yourself in the general expressions. A good way to create space for you to develop an editorial that can be optimized for these expressions is to create a special section of tips, advice or assistance.

This section may contain multiple pages. Example for a bike shop: Choose an ATV How to choose a woman bike? The man bicycles and their uses, etc..

Each of these pages will allow you to write unique content and perfectly optimized. It just remains to incorporate links to your pages of entries for “push” them. Of course, these help pages will also benefit from an external net linking.

Design a FAQ

It’s crazy what people can turn to Google as a person. They ask him questions as they would with a friend. But Google is a big beta, when you ask him a question; he seeks the issue in the pages it has indexed, not the answer.

A FAQ so you can position yourself on these issues and to drain the corresponding traffic. A small example, type in Google “what is a hard link” you will see that the site does Axe net up not too bad.

Set up a blog

We mentioned already last year with concrete examples of blogs associated with e-commerce sites. This strategy is actually very profitable. The blog makes it very easy to position themselves on hundreds of requests for strategic activity of the shop.

It will however not too smart “blurrier” in terms of commercial items. The blog will be better received if he gives advice or relevant information about the universe, why not try to systematically sell something. He brings a kind of professional bail while to drain a portion of traffic to the store.

5 Crispy SEO Tips for E-Commerce Websites by Techniblogic.  Available from <http://techniblogic.com/5-crispy-seo-tips-for-e-commerce-websites/#> [Dec 29, 2016]

Mobile marketing tools and tips for 2017

Mobile marketing tools and tips for 2017 by Margie Kupfer.  Available from <https://www.luxurydaily.com/mobile-marketing-tools-and-tips-for-2017/> [January 03, 2017]

As the New Year begins, marketers are carefully planning their strategies for their campaigns in 2017. Sure, there are plenty of tools, tips and tricks to choose from, but selecting the right ones for your brand’s objectives is crucial.

Here is a crash course in the mobile marketing tools that brands should use in 2017:

Location-based marketing
As futuristic as it sounds, location-based marketing is sweeping the nation as one of the most popular marketing tools with both consumers and businesses.

What makes location-based marketing so popular is that it eliminates irrelevant ads by presenting the consumer with promotions based on their current location.

Location-based marketing can be accomplished through the use of geofencing, beacons, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Tip: Think outside of the box when it comes to selecting your location to send customers promotions.

Instead of just sending customers notification when they are near a store, send them promotions when they are near locations in which the brand’s products or services would be useful.

For example, a pet supply store could send customers promotions when they are near the dog park.

Developing an app-plus strategy
It is obvious that mobile marketing is a major factor in the success of any marketing strategy.

According to British publication The Guardian, 91 percent of top brands have applications. But simply having an app is not enough to satisfy mobile customers anymore.

A recent survey by us shows that more than 25 percent of apps end up abandoned after the first use. By developing an app-plus strategy, brands can help keep customers engaged.

Tip: Create additional capabilities for brand apps such as messaging, mobile wallet and an integrated loyalty program.

Businesses are increasing the longevity of the app by creating one that does more than just deliver information about the brand and lets customers browse product offerings.

Social media messaging is the new SMS
Messaging alternatives to text messages are quickly becoming a preferred method of communication.

Adweek cites that 49 percent of mobile users in the United States use messaging apps monthly.

One of the most popular examples of these messaging apps is Facebook Messenger. This kind of messaging seamlessly integrates with already popular social media networks and allows users to send information back and forth quickly over the Internet as opposed to traditional text messaging.

For these reasons, these apps are ideal for communication between brands and customers.

Tip: After a customer has reached out to a brand via Facebook Messenger, the brand has a 24-hour window in which it is allowed to send that customer promotional content.

Take advantage of this opportunity to offer customers personalized and exclusive deals. This will build the relationship between the customer and brand, increasing the chances of repeat business.

Mobile marketing tools and tips for 2017 by Margie Kupfer.  Available from <https://www.luxurydaily.com/mobile-marketing-tools-and-tips-for-2017/> [January 03, 2017]

15 Tips for Ensuring Top-Quality Mobile Apps

15 Tips for Ensuring Top-Quality Mobile Apps by John Barnett.  Available from <http://www.business.com/mobile-apps-and-tools/john-barnett-app-making-tips/> [December 30, 2016]

When developing an app for your business, one of the top priorities is creating one that people actually want to use. Unfortunately, there is often a significant disconnect between what a target audience needs and what a mobile app offers. Keep the following mobile app development tips in mind to ensure the utmost quality.

Be Proficient with All Target Platforms

All too often, developers favor one mobile app platform over another, and it shows in the quality of their work. Ideally, mobile apps should be developed by professionals who understand the unique aspects of all of the platforms that they are targeting. Read user interface guidelines carefully to understand the available features for each platform. Being familiar with the visual and behavioral differences and similarities of various platforms allows you to put them to use more effectively.

Don’t Be Biased

Make an effort to learn to appreciate all of the most popular mobile app platforms. Sure, you probably prefer one or two over others, but all platforms have their strengths. By embracing differences between app platforms, you will get enthusiastic about designing for each. This enthusiasm will result in products that are truly out of this world.

Don’t Sacrifice Performance for Analytics

For many businesses, mobile apps are more about collecting useful information than about providing services to customers. Still, resist the temptation to bog down your app with too many SDKs (software development kits). Apps that are bloated with excessive SDKs tend to run slowly, crash often and drain battery life at a remarkable speed. No one likes apps like these.

Keep Scale in Mind

There is no telling how popular any given app will be. It pays to design apps with the assumption that they will go viral. That way, there’s a minimal risk that your app will fail due to thousands of concurrent users. Always develop apps with a huge scale data distribution in mind.

Build Native User Interfaces Last for Cross-Platform Apps

The vast majority of apps are cross-platform ones, which makes sense if you want yours to be accessible to the largest number of people. Save yourself time and effort by modeling the programming logic off as local web services and building native user interfaces last.

Avoid Redundant Tracking

Going overboard with tracking can be highly problematic. Repetitive, redundant tracking makes it more difficult to maintain the underlying code as your company expands and evolves and as developers update their APIs.

Use It Yourself

If you’re not already comfortable with all of the platforms that you are targeting, try your hand at all of them to get a feel for how they work. The same applies to your app. Try to put yourself in users’ shoes. Would this app address your needs? Would you keep it on your smartphone and use it, or is it a waste of time?

Enable Easy App Integration

Don’t assume that users won’t be interested in sharing information from your app through other apps like Facebook or Gmail. Make it easy for users to do this by enabling app integration in your mobile app. A little extra work is involved, but it will make your app more useful and help you avoid going back and doing it later.

Accommodate for Different Design Styles Across Platforms

What looks amazing on an iOS device may look anything but that on an Android or Windows OS device. Different platforms have different aesthetic qualities, and it pays to understand these parameters before developing a cross-platform app. Carefully consider how your branding will translate across platforms and design your app accordingly.

Make it Simple

The best apps are easy for just about anyone to use. It’s easy to lose sight of how people with varying degrees of technical prowess will interact with an app, so make sure to include non-tech-savvy people during the testing phase. Is the design intuitive enough for newbies? Is the written content easy to understand? Where do users seem to get stuck?

Take Advantage of the Latest Features

Your new app shouldn’t be outdated. Avoid this issue by always using the latest client device SDKs. It also pays to stay up to date regarding the latest changes and advances in various platforms. By including cutting-edge features in your app, you’re more likely to attract a wider audience.

Test Often

Apps are often rushed, and testing is the step that developers are most likely to speed through. What’s worse is they complete a single round of tests and call it good. It pays to test early and often — especially when it comes to cross-platform apps, which can quickly cause issues.

Plan for Offline Use

A mobile app isn’t truly “mobile” if it ceases to function when the device is offline. The best apps boast a decent offline functionality, so be sure to include it in yours. Data should be saved to local storage so that it can be restored when the app is opened again. Any changes can then be synced, for the user to have a seamless online/offline experience.

Have One Purpose

As tempting as it may be to cram a ton of features into your app, it’s far better to focus on one and to really make it shine. Make it something that you’re truly good at and that users will actually benefit from. That way, they are less likely to get tripped up on unhelpful, confusing features that never belonged there in the first place.

Embrace Analytics

While you shouldn’t overdo it with the analytics, you should monitor them regularly to see how people are faring with your app. How are they using it? Which devices are they accessing it from? Are there features that seem to trip users up and make them abandon the app? By keeping an eye on your analytics, you can respond swiftly when issues arise.

If you find yourself going for custom app development versus out-of-the-box one, keep these tips in mind to create a product that your audience will rely on and become loyal to.

15 Tips for Ensuring Top-Quality Mobile Apps by John Barnett.  Available from <http://www.business.com/mobile-apps-and-tools/john-barnett-app-making-tips/> [December 30, 2016]

What does 2017 hold for web design?

What does 2017 hold for web design? by Mark Lusted.  Available from <http://www.netimperative.com/2017/01/top-tips-2017-hold-web-design/> [January 03, 2017]

2016 has been an eventful year, to say the least. Now as the dust begins to settle it’s time to reflect on what 2017 will have in store for us. In particular, what the world of web design might look like next year and what trends will we see start to take off.

Of course, like any trend, these go in and out of fashion and may not necessarily suit every person and every taste. However, we like to think of each trend as an ‘additional tool’ to our designer toolbox, where we pick the right ones for the job at hand.

Custom illustrations and photography

Stock photography and iconography library websites are available to millions of designers all over the world, making it harder to be original and risking ending up like a competitor.

Custom illustration or photography can bring something unique and communicate the brand message in a more meaningful way. It can create a personality, set the appropriate tone and help convey the key information with your audience.

Take our latest project, the redesign of our company website. We decided to take all our own photographs and draw our own icon library set so that we could show our users who we truly are and communicate what it’s really like to work at Dock9.

There is a lot of ‘same same’ evident on the web. Thanks to template offering services such as Squarespace, websites are looking more and more similar to each other. Many are realising that the bespoke design can actually go a long way for a brand and we expect to see a significant change here.

After all, in a hugely competitive business world where your website is often the first place customers interact with you, wouldn’t you want your site to stand out from others?

Conversational interfaces

As the emergence of robo-advisers, such as mortgage firm Habito, chatbots will become an increasingly important part of the online UX, which presents challenges to designers.

Not all designers are able to switch to being content creators – this seems to sit better with those who have been in performing arts or literature previously (Howdy – a chatbot within Slack – and X.ai – a personal assistant who schedules meetings – both hired writers with performing-art experience to assist with defining their products’ UX).

Here the micro-copy writer becomes king. We all know only 5% of language is conveyed through words so it is easy to accidentally come across as rude or offend someone. Designers who have the ability to insert personality (and sometimes humour) into chatbots will be in higher demand.

Animation

Animation is becoming an expected feature. Since the release of Google Material Design, interface animations returned to the designer’s toolset. Not as over the top flash animations, but as a way to give more meaning to mundane interactions, making the interface feel more real, fun and even enabling designers to spin something negative into a potentially positive experience. For instance, loading and 404 animations.

The Google Material Design subtle shadows effects and concepts of movement and depth are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to flat design for designers. We expect to see a lot more of it next year.

Microinteractions

We all use microinteractions both in the physical and online world on a regular basis, from pressing the button at traffic lights to liking a friend’s status on Facebook. They are not new, however, they are becoming more important in terms of design.

Done correctly, microinteractions make users feel in control like they know how to use your site. Done badly and impacts can range from irritating your user to them closing the site completely. It will be interesting to see who gets them right, and wrong, in 2017.

Minimalistic Design

Minimalistic design is popping up more and more on the web. With less ‘cramming’ of content above the fold, companies are choosing their copy and imagery carefully, to create beautiful aesthetic experiences. Not only does it look great on all devices but it loads quickly and is no fuss. Designers are cutting down on the number of elements in order to create hierarchy and a fresh, uncluttered UI. Flat icons, flat navigation bars, flat buttons and a general loving for everything minimal is pretty much everywhere.

Continued growth of long scrolling

Once upon a time, scrolling through lots of content meant moving your arrow to the side of the screen and pulling a bar down repeatedly to reach the bottom. Dark times.

Now with a simple swipe of the finger (including on my touchscreen laptop), it is easy to sweep through long content. Long scrolling requires fewer clicks and allows for more narrative approaches.

What improves the UX is the use of fun and/or eye-catching transitions and differentiated section designs, making what could be a lengthy schlepp into a voyage of discovery.

Virtual Reality

This one may be a bit further in the future than next year but this list would be meaningless without mentioning VR. Both designing a site that uses it and designing using VR itself will happen more frequently in the future. This will require a whole new set of practices and tools that most designers have yet to discover.

What does 2017 hold for web design? by Mark Lusted.  Available from <http://www.netimperative.com/2017/01/top-tips-2017-hold-web-design/> [January 03, 2017]