1) What is a domain name ?



A domain name is the location of your website on the internet, it is also the location of your company, or your private enterprise in the immense internet market.

In case a domain name named the same with your offline brand name, location, hotel or restaurant, tour specialist, local region or community which is well-known in tourism market, you have had a big advantage than different competitor. Because of:

•You will receive targeted visitor tourism your website, For example: You are a travel company who supply some kind of Trekking tour in the favorite Nepal, your chosen domain name should be:

Nepal Trekkingtour

Nepal-trekkingtour

Besttrekking-Nepal… and so on

Visitor will find very easily to communicate with a travel company which has the name is the description of the kind of services they are finding, and you will better in persuading your client because they are all prospect visitor.

•Your website will be listed in Yahoo! In Travel Directory and other Search Engine results. Imagine when a visitor want to spend a trekking tour in Nepal, he decides to search internet to find a good supply among a thousand of sites. He chose Google, for example, and enter keyword of his wish: “ Nepal + trekking tour". And a a result of choosing a right target domain name, your website URL and a short description will appear at the sight and he clicks.

But remember, whether he chooses your services or not depend on a process of building credibility which originate from: your site design, your respond, the price, your level of professional and much more…

But you have had an advantage when you have chosen a right domain and your prospect client has seen you among thousand of competitor.

2) Domain name extension:

.com

Each domain has what's called an extension. The most well known of these extensions is .com. This extension is encouraged to be used most, because it is tightened in the mind of all the people around the world. All the surfers tend to enter it after almost domain name. So because it long time used at the beginning of internet era so it difficult to chose a good domain name. COM.

.net

If you can't find your preferred .com domain name you could always choose the same domain with a .net extension. It might not have the same ring as a .com but is still as just useful as a .com.

.org

These domain extensions were originally designed for educational and more formal websites. As a tourism organization, we can use it. But all of it are enterprise such as hotel or travel company… it is not recommend to chose it.

.info

A more recent introduction to the domain name game are .info domains. Many of the valuable .info domains were bought up overnight but there's still a huge range of good .info domains available. Bear in mind that most web. Not recommended.

.travel

This is a newcomer, we can use it well because it is to identify all the tourism and hospitality website. A new rule...

There a great article about “.travel" by the link below:

http://www.tourism-internetmarketing.com/ITtourism/1/20.htm

There are many region extension: uk, us, vn, … which is suite for your online tourism partner to used to indicate our region location and services. It also an advantage for inbound tourism and hospitality supply. A visitor is seem to put his truth on a local professional supply, certainly!

3) Brand name versus Business name:

We are hardly to know exactly whether to chose a domain name actually reflect our real business or establish a new brand name online and promote it. A right choice is base on your own case after give a careful consideration on marketing strategy of our company.

If you are a well-known company who want to target the inbound visitors, get your long time famous brand name is the right choice. Because your client will see it easy for them to find your web and remember it as you are famous ih their mind.

But if you want to take advantage of the global market, a business name enclose with the region maybe a better choice.

Try to register a domain which contains a popular keyword applicable for your industry. This will help your customers remember your domain name better. Furthermore, for searches conducted in Yahoo!, a higher ranking will be given to those web sites which contain the keywords in the title. And according to Yahoo!'s instructions, the Title should always be the official name of the site. Thus, if the domain name contains a keyword, you will be able to include the keyword in the Title which will improve your ranking in Yahoo!. As a minor side-benefit, this can also help to increase the ranking of your web site in some search engines.

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4) Hyphenated or not

This is another area of debate. Should your domain be one single word or should the words be separated by hyphens? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Single word domain names can be easier to explain, use on header paper and lend themselves to brand names very well.

Single word domains are in very, very short supply.

Hyphenated domains names can be slightly more difficult to explain, may not look as well on headed paper and possibly harder to establish as a brand name. There's no shortage of multiple word domains.

The single biggest advantage a hyphenated domain has is that searche engines can "read" the domain more easily. For example in a domain like www.foreignholidaysonline.com the search engine can only read the first word "foreign" and that's it. It can't tell anything else about the website domain name.

If you hyphenated that to www.foreign-holidays-online.com the search engine can read "foreign", "holidays" and "online" as separate words and therefore knows that this website is about foreign holidays.

A well chosen hyphenated domain name can be just as effective as a single word domain name.

5) Don't make your primary domain too long. Even though 67 character domains are a reality, exactly how many of your users will want to type a domain name like thebesttrekkingtourinnepal.com?

6) Chose the supplier:

There are many domain suppliers waiting for you out there online, the best choice is find out a well-known web servers who always supply the services Domain name registration. A good domain name .com will can be get at the price of 15 $, but you can buy it cheaper as the price of 7,95$.

Are there any disadvantages in using a discount domain registrar? Will it affect your website in any way? The answer to both is a definite No.

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There is a great resource for Tourism internet marketing in Tourism Marketing Forum. Click the link below to get a forum account to read this resources:

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