The Importance of

Everything begins with staking your claim to your piece of virtual land.

There was a time when pioneers and adventurers staked their claim to a plot of land. They put their flag in the ground, and that ground became theirs. The same thing is happening today, only this time the real estate is virtual, but nevertheless just as valuable.
As a business, we have to stake a claim to the virtual land that belongs to us. This, in techie terms, is what we call a domain.

For example, if you are Joe Bloggs the gardener from Glendale, you might want to stake your claim to JoeBloggsgardener.com.
Even better, bearing in mind that people search locally for services that you can offer, why not stake your claim to GlendaleGardener.com or GardenerInGlendale.com.
But we don’t want to stop there, we also want Facebook.com/glendalegardener and Twitter.com/glendalegardener.

Get the picture?

People are searching for “gardener in glendale”, or “gardeners in glendale”, or “Glendale gardener”, and to own the domain name that perfectly fits with that local search can be a very powerful aid to getting noticed on the Internet.

Contrary to popular understanding, just having the right domain name is often not enough. It really is just a beginning, and there are many factors that will determine whether, and where, you appear in the search engines.

But this is the best place to begin. Stake your claim, get your name, and make sure you have the right domain!
There are lots of places to do this, called registrars. We have always found Namecheap a great source, but the choice is yours where to cheaply, register your claim to the name.

When we build a website for anyone, we always insist that they and only they have control of their domain name. However good a third party’s intentions are (including ourseleves), this is not their online piece of real estate it belongs to the business and needs to be controlled by the business to ensure it is renewed and managed the way it should.

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