REthink Wine Blog

As a Launch Manager here at Inertia, I’m always recommending that our clients register more than just their main domain name. The goal of a domain name is to get as much relevant traffic to your website as possible. If you don’t register as many relevant domains as possible, you may find that your competition will gladly do so.

Domain names can be as long as 63 characters with alpha and numeric characters as well as dashes. The average number of domain name characters is 11. The following (7) .com domain strings are the ones that I recommend most often because of their relevance to the wine industry. (Just place your winery name before the string; i.e. Inertiawine.com):

1. …wine.com
2. …wines.com
3. …winery.com
4. …vineyard.com
5. …vineyards.com
6. …cellar.com
7. …cellars.com

Fact 1

According to VeriSign and Zooknic, as of July 2007, the total base of domain name registrations worldwide was 138 million across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). While there are other Top Level Domain (TLD) options to choose from (.net, .org, .biz, .info, .name), .com remains the largest TLD in terms of its total base of registrations, with .de (Germany), and .net following. (see chart below)

 

Fact 2

The number of new registrations hit an all time high in the second quarter of 2007 with 14.5 million new domain name registrations. Country Code (cc) TLDs were a major factor driving the continued growth in new registrations with China (.cn) showing the most growth. There are more than 240 ccTLD extensions globally but the top ten ccTLDs contribute 66% of the total. Below are the top 10 ccTLDs from a domain name base of 51.5 million

Fact 3

According to VeriSign, July 2007, 88% of all .com and .net domain names resolve to a website, whether live or parked. Live websites are multi-page websites being used by an organization or an individual and parked websites are defined as one-page websites.

In terms of e-commerce, domain name selection should be just as important as the type of wine you choose to offer your customers. Without a good domain name, your website may never receive the traffic it deserves. And if you choose not to register all the relevant domain names, you may be giving away customers to your competition.

This entry was posted by admin on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under Site Design and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.