Choosing A Money Making Domain Name For Your Real Estate Website Part 5

July 28, 2010

In other words, if you register a .us (United States) or .ca (Canada) domain then your website will be viewed by search engines as being only of interest to people living in that country or of interest to people specifically searching for something in or about that country.  The drawback with this is you will be less likely to get attention from international real estate investors or people moving to your country than if you had a .com.  If you can live with this then you can probably get the domain you’re looking for.

Here are some domain extensions you can use that aren’t restricted geographically:

.biz – this is basically the same as having a .com.  The .biz domain was created to relieve some of the demand for .com domains and to provide an alternative for businesses whose preferred domain name in .com was already registered.  The yearly registration cost of .biz domains is often half the price of .coms.

.info – this is a great domain name to use because it’s very inexpensive to register (only costs $1-2 per domain per year) and presents you as an information source on your local real estate market.

.net – although this type of domain is associated with Internet infrastructure companies such as Internet Service Providers, it gives your business the connotation of being an online based real estate business.  You definitely want to give that impression to prospects nowadays whenever possible.

.mobi – these are domains intended for indicating websites viewable on a mobile device such as a cell phone or Blackberry with web browsing capabilities.  The standard has been backed by most of the largest mobile device manufacturers in the world.  Note that a website using a .mobi extension need not be mobile device ready.

TLD has a free testing tool called Ready.mobi for analyzing the mobile readiness of any website. It analyzes your pages gives a .mobi Ready score from 1 to 5. This report tests the mobile-readiness of the site using dotMobi’s recommended best practices.

Use Numbers In Your Domain – sometimes simply inserting a number somewhere in an otherwise unavailable domain can get you the domain you want.  For instance, <yourcityname>homes.com is probably taken, but 4<your-city-name>homes.com or <your-city-name>4homes.com is much less likely taken.

Learn more about building your ecommerce based real estate business by taking any of my online based continuing education credit courses.

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