That Smith

I’m back with my second list of available domain names perfect for Wichita businesses and entrepreneurs, plus another search engine optimization tip for once you register your new domain.

Last time I shared 25 available Wichita domains from my list of 300. Here are another 25 that are equally as good.

Again I ask you only register what you need, and not simply to try to resell them. There are plenty of businesses in our city that would benefit from these names, and buying them to resell would only decrease the amount of money flowing through our economy.

Each of these domains are “geographic” domains because they include the name of our city. Geographic domains are excellent for people doing business locally, however they are only valuable to someone who has a related business. No one in Wichita would be willing to pay more than the registration cost of these domains, so buying one without having a use for it would be pointless.

Each of the domains above were available at the time of this message and can be registered through GoDaddy for $6.95/year using OYH3 as a promo code.

Beginners tip: many business owners I work with grab as many related domain names as they can, thinking each one will increase the traffic to their site. This is usually not the case because the domains do nothing unless people are able to find them.

Most visitors today search rather than attempting to find something by blindly typing keywords as a domain, then, even when they do know a domain name, they usually type it into a search engine anyway.

All it takes to get a new site listed in search engines is having an existing site link to it. This sounds easy, but relying solely on it usually means you’re going to wait months before seeing any traffic. This also explains why pages you thought were private will eventually end up in search engine land.

Instead, all major search engines provide you with a method to add a new URL. If you register your domain as a business, you will receive an endless supply of offers to renew your domain (usually a transfer) or to submit it to thousands of major search engines. Ignore these because they are scams, plus if you only do business locally there are only three you need to worry about.

You can add your domain to their indexes here:

Google | Yahoo | MSN

SEO tip: getting back to what I first said about grabbing as many related domains as possible, doing so is fine, but it is very important that only one is used for the actual content. What I mean by this can be explained by how I have this site. Currently, three domains point here (thatsmith.com, miniwanker.com, and progreeting.com), however only thatsmith.com is displayed in the address bar.

It’s possible to keep the other domains in the address, however this would give each page three unique addresses which would actually harm my rank in search engines.

This is because search engines detect the pages as exact duplicates of each other which they penalize for. It is fine to have more than one address, but make sure the rest permanently redirect to your primary one so you aren’t penalized. Why search engines penalize for duplicate content is another topic.

When I started working for my current employer they had 17 domains, each of which loaded the site with its own unique address. Now 16 of those redirect to the 1 primary domain and our search engine rankings, traffic, and revenue have increased dramatically (other optimizations were done as well). The 16 other domains are still used for special marketing promotions.

Watch out when redirecting your duplicates though because you also need to consider http vs https and www vs non-www addresses. More on those next time.