Strategies That Can Make a Domain Name More Powerful and Boost Traffic	1.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
James Helliwell March 01, 2017

The choice of a domain name is one of the most important decisions you will make for your business. It has the potential to add or subtract from your brand value, and offers a good platform to communicate your USP and pique the web visitor’s interest at an instant.

“But your domain name can be much more than just your website address. In fact, it can be the most important component of your online branding strategy, the major driver of web traffic to your site and leading factor in your SEO ranking.” - Web and Hosting specialists from Freeparking.co.nz

You probably been lectured many times over about the need to make your carve out a domain name that is short, concise, brand-able, keyword-rich and has a .com extension. Those are all fine and will contribute to your overall branding and SEO strategy, but there’s a more powerful strategy that is often used by the biggest online brands. Actually, it is one of the major the secret strategies they used in making their brands more powerful and you should learn it too.

It is called website forwarding. Here’s how it basically works and why larger organisations take advantage of this very useful technique to reinforce their online presence and drive traffic. You register a main and preferred domain name, and that serves as the official web address of your business.

Next, you register several other similar sounding domain names or the same domain names with extensions, other than the one used for your main domain name. These other ‘secondary’ domain names are essentially to serve as a dummy site that forwards a visitor who has ‘missed their way’ on the web to the main website.

With this strategy, the main domain name automatically becomes more powerful and a traffic driver as visitors searching for the website actually get there; even if they didn’t actually remember or typed in the right address.

It’s quite a simple and easy strategy that small and medium sized digital businesses can also benefit form if they’re willing to commit to it.

Here are examples of how larger organisations have greatly explored this tool to their advantage and boosted the reach and profile of their domain names.

1. They register other domain name extensions (TLDs) with their selected domain name.

In addition to their main URL which they probably have successfully registered with a .com TLD, they also register the domain name with other TLDs such as .org, .net, and .biz.

That is why even when an Internet user mistakenly types in, for example, www.microsoft.net or www.microsoft.org in the web browser, they’re automatically directed to their primary website, www.microsoft.com.

2. They also register common spelling errors of their domain name among web users when trying to type in their domain name in their web browser.

Have you ever mistakenly typed www.amazn.com and still, well, thankfully, got directed to the original website, www.amazon.com? So you know, this right here was the reason why.

3. They additionally register domain names that sound or look similar to their own.

If, say, the primary site of an online business had a figure in word in the domain name, to avoid the potential loss of traffic that misspellings or confusions on the actual domain name contents may cause, they could additionally register domain names with the figure also; and vice versa. For example, the organization, www.ninewest.com further registered the domain name, www.9west.com so as to forward traffic of web users who mistakenly typed in the wrong address to the real website.

4. They register their domain name in other major languages as well.

This particular website forward tactic is used by businesses who conduct business in other languages too. For example, if you typed in www.zapatos.com in your web browser, you will be automatically directed to the www.shoes.com (‘zapatos’ is Spanish for ‘shoes’).