Well, everything! And this becomes even more important when it comes to names on the internet. There are some domain names that aren’t part of your everyday lingua franca, but they still always get the repeat traffic because people can remember the name. And since there is such a fine science behind the art of naming, we asked a few active #ciopk and #blaagers followers on Twitter, to help us put these bits and pieces of advice together.

@hamaddar says, “Use keywords but make sure it looks professional as in the case of PakMusic.com.” According to Hammad, keywords plus great company name gives you a greater chance of being remembered. @awaisnaseer offers, “the URL should describe what the website is all about. It will allow people to remember the URL.” One of the favorite websites that Awais loves for this reason alone belongs to a fellow-tweeter, @jadoon88 who runs his site called ‘WhatReallySucks.com’. That URL is so self-explanatory it needs no introduction!

And then since we were chatting about great names, @awaisnaseer whips out his list of names he thinks need no explanation because they say what they are in the URL. “URLs such as listcollections.com, listphobia.com, pingmycompany.com, CIOpakistan.com, thegadgets.net, appleinsider.com are some examples.”@hamaddar poses a question, “if my site was called downloadpakimusic.com, how unprofessional would that be? Do you think anyone would webpartner with me for concerts?” Well, considering the fact that one of the rules of having a good website address is that it is something that describes a natural search query or action people do. So if I was interested in ‘downloading Pakistani music’, chances are high that I will land on the ‘downloadpakimusic’ domain. @skdev furthers the lesson by saying, “Don’t use something for a title that you have to spell out.

Something like ‘good4u.com’ or phrases like ‘gee’, ‘oh oh’ or ‘4u’ can add to confusion since, believe it or not, we don’t usually talk like that!

@awaisnaseer offers another tip: “don’t be shy to choose a phrase in the URL. In fact, try and use the keyword in the URL. I made it onto Google’s first page for a highly searched phrase in only 2 months!” And getting on the first page of search results for specific terms means a healthy growth rate of the organic traffic. You can never get too much organic traffic coming into your site because that is a strong sign that not only are people searching for your value offering, but these are usually new visitors.

Depending on the strategy you have employed, you can convert these newcomers to repeat visitors, hence growing the site of your audience base. @awaisnaseer on the other hand is still working hard at getting a high ranking on Google’s first results page for the query “Gadgets”.

It is wise to have a few aliases lined up to point to your primary domain. In fact, when you register a domain and you get suggestions for multiple extensions, even those are great. If you’re going to for a dotcom domain and are launching a service in Pakistan, you might also want to consider going for a dotcom-dotpk domain extension also. There’s that, and then providing your consumers a number of ways to get to you. An example of this could be if you had “coke.com.pk”, you might also want to have “brrrrr.com.pk” (though this might be difficult unless you have made a conscious effort to limit the number of r’s in all the ads) or have something along the lines of “khaleypeelayjeelay.com” since that is what your slogan is for Pakistan. Zong could have a ‘Subkehdo.com.pk’ domain to add more multimedia value of the campaigns they run on television, in addition to their corporate website. Telecom companies could just as easily replicate the alias regime by getting the ‘aursunao.com.pk’ and ‘itsfuntobeyoung.com.pk’ to do either just have it pointing back to the corporate websites or do something more with it.

But yes, all in all, getting the name right, can be the difference between making or breaking your site. And when in doubt, do a few quick focus group tests online with the power of the name on Twitter. There are loads of people out there who can help.

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