Who is your target audience?

Who is your target audience and who are you trying to reach is a question that needs to be answered before you ever write the first line of code for your web site.  This decision alone will determine how you can better market your web site; how you will structure your web pages; the words you will use in your web site keywords, domain name registrations, meta data, web site description, paragraphs, and even importantly overlooked details such as ALT image tags.  Are you targeting a relatively small market within your own geographic area?  Do you want to be internationally known?  If you plan for optimizing your web site in order to achieve higher search engine rankings from the very beginning, your placement will be much easier to obtain.  Know your target audience before you go any further!

A domain name is just a name, or is it?

Having a domain name that is easy to remember will insure people can find your site easily.  Making your web site easy to get to will increase the visitors to your site.  Search engines take many different factors into account in how they rate or place a web site within their search engine database. A few of these factors include how many visitors you receive, and how many other web sites are linking to your web site.  Obviously, a web site recieving a large amount of regular visitors and that has hundreds or thousands of web sites linking to it must be popular than a web site that has a few hundred visitors each month and only a few other web sites linking to it.  Finding a domain name that is easy to remember that is not already taken is becoming harder and harder to accomplish for the simple fact that cyber squatters are buying them up and attempting to extort large amounts of money from people who would want to own that name.

A couple of things we recommend you do in your web site planning stages is to really think about the domain name or names you register for your web site.  Do NOT just take the first name that comes to mind because you may be opening yourself up for legal battles if someone owns a trademark or copymark on the name you register.  For an example, lets assume you own a business with the name Personnel & Employee Placement Service, Inc.  We will use this name for the rest of the example.  If you already know what we are up to, just play along with us for this example and assume you dont know anything else about this name.

Domains names have a maximum length of characters they can contain, depending on your registrar.  The length used to be 26 charactors for .com, .net, and .org names but most registrars today will accept up to 63 characters.   Going with the example business name above, you will find it would have at least 33 characters if you simply spelled it out and registered personnelemployeeplacementservice.com.  This domain name simply has too much room for errors, i.e. a person could mispell it.  You might want to shorten the domain name, and as you think about it, the abbreviation would be great.  Without doing any further research, you decide to register pepsi.com.  Lets assume for a minute that you dont even know who pepsi is, and lets also assume for this article that the domain name pepsi.com is not registered.  You register the domain name and its now resolving to your web site.  You clearly have your contact information for your business posted.  Within a few weeks or maybe months or years you get a legal document in the mail and you are being sued for copyright or trademark infringement.  Why?  Because you used a trademarked name in your domain name.  Would pepsi win?  Of course they would.  Just trust us on this, if you get anything at all out of this article, make sure you do the research on any domain name you decide to use to save yourself from possible legal battles.