The idea behind it is to prerender the top search result in the background, so that when you do click the link the page loads immediately. Google says it will prerender pages when they’re confidant you’ll click the link, based on their relevance technology, and they expect the new development to shave between two and five seconds off typical searches

What do you think? Is this a great idea or are you happy to wait a few seconds to load your page of choice?

To use Google Instant at the moment, you’ll need to either try the developer version or wait for the next beta release of Chrome – for more information, take a look at Google’s post on Instant Pages.

You need to be logged in to a Google account to see it, but if you are, you’ll see that results now start to complete before you’ve even finished typing your query. Google uses what you’ve typed so far, combined with where you are and what you’ve searched for previously, to predict what query you’re trying to make and returns search results accordingly. These results will likely change as you finish typing your search term. The aim is to make it much faster to find the information you’re after by delivering the answer Google thinks you need before you’ve even finished asking the question – Google predicts that Instant will shave between two and five seconds off the average search query.

If search results – both paid and natural – are being returned before a query is even completed, though, what impact will that have on your pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts?

For PPC, let’s take it straight from the horse’s mouth. Google says that ad impressions will be counted in these circumstances:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

So, their thinking seems to be that impressions will still only be counted if there’s a reasonable chance that the person performing the search could be interested in your ad. Great!

At this stage, it’s too early to predict exactly what sort of effect the new system will have on your PPC campaign as a whole. Google’s expressed hope is that things will improve for you as Google Instant “helps people search using terms that more directly connect them with the answers they need”, but the best course of action is to continue to monitor your pay-per-click advertising campaign closely and adjust if necessary.

SEO can be a trickier beast to predict. Google Instant may make it more challenging for SEO experts to use search engine results pages (SERPs) to inform their activities, but at the moment, it’s not thought within the industry that Instant will have a tremendous impact on what you should actually do from the point of view of optimising your website. If you need a refresher course on SEO best practice, take a look at our Bibliography of SEO Resources and our  SEO Tips blog series.

So, for now, it’s carry on as you were but keep a close eye on your campaigns (we hope you do that anyway, of course!). We’ll keep you updated if we find Google Instant has really changed the landscape.

Happy that your carefully thought out ad campaign is live? Ready to put your feet up and wait for the sales to come rolling in? Well, if you want to get the best results from PPC (and spend your precious budget wisely), you can’t just launch your campaign and forget about it – you’ll need to keep on top of it. So, here are a few things to think about when managing your campaign.

Pruning

Once your campaign’s been up and running for a little while, you’ll be able to figure out which of your creatives and keywords are doing well and which aren’t. Go through your campaigns and look for keywords which have generated a cost but no sales/leads and put them on ‘pause’ to stop you burning money on keywords which don’t result in a conversion to sale/lead.

Take a look at the performance of your creatives and pause anything which has a very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and/or conversion rate. If the CTR is low, it means that for whatever reason that creative is just not grabbing the attention of the people who see it – so, time to rethink. If you’re getting the clickthroughs but the conversion rate is poor, people were interested in what your ad said but not persuaded by what they found on your website. Put your brutally honest hat on and ask yourself a few questions: are you overpromising in your ad so that people are arriving at your site and finding out the tempting offer isn’t so tempting after all? is your website as clear as it could be? have you made sure that the creative links directly to the relevant page rather than tipping them in at the home page and making them rummage? do you need more of a feel of ‘you can trust us’ about your website (e.g. clear design, recognisable partner and/or payment provider logos, a postal address and phone number, testimonials, clear delivery/returns/privacy policy information, etc)?

Expanding

Now that you’ve paused the things which aren’t working, you should have a bit of budget freed up to push towards the things which are. So:

- Where keywords are generating leads at a good price, bid up and see if you can grab a bit more of the traffic

- While you’re at it, if you’ve got keywords which are generating cost-effective leads, think about how you can expand upon them. Can you create new keyword phrases which are similar? Perhaps consider relaxing the match type from ‘Exact’ to ‘Phrase’ or even ‘Broad’ if you’re confident your budget can cope and you want to expand your reach?

- You’ll have some creatives that are working well and have good CTRs and conversion rates, which should give you a feel for what entices your potential customers to both click on your ad and, crucially, make the purchase. Try writing new variations of your creative using these as a guide.

- Use the Search Query Report (here’s Google on how to set that up) to identify possible new keywords to add to your campaign. You can also use it to identify negative keywords that you can add.

Negative keywords?

Yep! As well as adding keywords for which you do want your ads to appear, you can stipulate keywords for which you don’t want your ads to appear. Why would you do that? Well, imagine that you sell clothing but only stock womenswear and your footwear range doesn’t include trainers. There’s no point in your ad appearing to people interested in trainers or menswear as you’ll just be racking up clickthrough costs when you don’t stock the product the searcher was after and so won’t make a sale. If you add ‘trainers’, ‘menswear’, ‘y-fronts’ etc to your negative keywords list, you’ll guard against this and thus make your campaign more efficient.

Here’s a bit more from Google about negative keywords.

Interested in more about PPC?

And that’s the end of our walkthrough for setting up and managing a pay per click advertising campaign – I hope it’s been helpful for you! But, it’s such an important (and sometimes mysterious!) subject that there’s plenty more I could talk about. I could happily waffle on about random aspects of PPC, but this is the perfect opportunity for you to direct what I talk about by asking those niggling questions. So, do you have any burning questions about PPC? Is there something which has been confusing you since you first logged in to Google AdWords? Leave a comment and we’ll use your questions as the starting point for the next PPC article.

Previous articles in this series:

An Introduction to Pay Per Click Advertising

A little about PPC match types

Writing your ads

Budgets for PPC campaigns

How deep are your pockets?

First things first – how much money do you have available for your PPC advertising campaign? If you’ve claimed your Google AdWords vouchers, free with web hosting, Virtual Private Servers, online shops and instant websites, you’ll have a bit of a head start for the launch of your campaign  That aside, though, for the sake of keeping track of your finances you really need to be thinking in terms of a monthly budget.

So, what can you spare? Figure out from that how much you want to spend per day. You’ll see that Google recommends a daily budget based on your keywords – if your budget is lower than this, Google aims to deliver the ads when demand is greatest, which means you should have presence at the busiest times but your ads won’t be available to be seen 24/7. The trick is to find the best possible balance between what you can afford and what the market will deliver.

Here’s a bit more from Google about campaign budgets.

Setting your bid prices

You’ll also need to give some thought to bid prices. For each keyword, you’ll need to consider both what you can afford to bid and what the market price is – if other people are paying over £1 per click your ad won’t get displayed if you’re only prepared to pay 50p. Inevitably, some keywords will cost more than others because they’re more popular so you’ll need to balance the higher cost per click against the higher potential rewards of a popular search term.

Here’s a bit more from Google about bidding.

It’s time to launch your campaign!

Now that you’ve built your campaign and sorted out your budget it’s finally time to go live! Once you’ve done so, you can check that your ads are appearing without racking up impressions at: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Don’t just fire your campaign off into the ether and leave Google to it, though – to get the best results you need to keep an eye on how all your keywords are performing. We’ll talk a bit more about ongoing campaign management in the next article.

Earlier Articles in this series

Part One – Generating your keywords

Part Two – Keyword match types

Part Three – Writing your adverts

Differentiate yourself

There’s a lot of competition out there, so have a think about what makes your particular products and services unique – are you the cheapest in the market? Do you have the widest range of widgets? Do you have an amazing price promise? Try to get these features into your ads to help you stand out from the crowd.

Keep it brief.

You’re limited to 25 characters for your headline, 70 for the main body of your ad, which will be split across two lines when it appears in Google, and 35 characters for a display URL (this doesn’t have to be the full destination URL if that’s too long, but it should be on the same domain and look relevant). You’re looking for snappy, concentrated little sales pitches. If you can’t say everything you want to say about a particular product in one ad…

…Create variations.

Since each ad has such limited space, you can’t expect one ad to appeal to all people or promote all aspects of your product or service. Three variations of each is a good start. This is the place to experiment with different approaches to promoting the same thing – you’ll be able to view the sales stats later on and see which is the most successful.

Keep your headlines relevant.

You’ve already identified your keyword search terms, so make sure you match your headline to the search terms within each ad group.

Include a price in the headline

People are always enticed by a strong pricepoint, so if yours looks competitive there’s a good chance you’ll get the clicks. But there is a bit more to it than that – if someone clicks on an ad with a price in it, it’s likely they’re happy to pay that price – which means you won’t be paying for clicks from people who’d rather pay less. Plus, everyone loves a discount so if you’ve got a special offer running then phrases like ‘save now’ and ‘X% off’ are a great idea.

Don’t forget your call to action!

Your ads will work better if you tell people what you want them to do, so include active phrases like ‘reserve’, ‘research, and ‘discover’. A sense of urgency helps, too, so try phrases like ‘Book now’, ‘Buy now’ and ‘Sign up today’. As Google points out, ‘find’ might be relevant but it doesn’t actively encourage a sale!

Target your links.

You’re much more likely to get conversions from your ads if they send customers directly to the most relevant page than if you send them to your homepage and expect them to rummage for the information they were after. Our general web hosting ads, for example, send people directly to the web hosting section of the website rather than pointing them at the www.daily.co.uk homepage.

Here’s a bit more from Google on creating your PPC ads

Next time, we’ll be delving into the money side of things with some thoughts on bid prices and budgeting. As ever, leave a comment or drop us a line if there’s something you’d like us to cover.

So, what’s next?

Within Google AdWords, there are several different settings for keyword match types – these determine the searches for which your adverts are likely to appear, so it’s important to understand what they all do. They are:

Broad match
This is the default setting for all keywords, and means that your ads may be displayed if the search is made using any of your keywords or phrases, in any order or combination. Your ads may also be displayed for searches whose keywords are similar to those of your keywords on broad match.

Leaving all your keywords set to broad match is certainly quicker, and will cast the net wide. But you should be aware that it’s the least finely targeted setting, and because of that you may burn through your budget more quickly.

Here’s a little more from Google on how broad match works.

Phrase Match
Phrase match narrows the reach a little. Your ads may be displayed any time someone searches for the exact words of your keyword phrase, in the order you have them.

Here’s a little more from Google on Phrase Match.

Exact Match
Exact match basically does what it says on the tin. If you choose this match type, your ads will only apply when your exact keyword phrase is used in the search, without any other words in the search. It does narrow the field considerably, but the real benefit is that the people who are served your ads are the very people most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, your money will be spent targeting the people most likely to part with their money in your direction!

Here’s a little more from Google on Exact Match.

Negative Match
It’s also possible to use a negative keywords to prevent your ads being shown for any search which includes certain undesirable terms, say, the word ‘free’ if you never offer your products or services for free and don’t want people just clicking through to you in hopes of a freebie

Here’s a little more from Google on Negative Match.

So which match type to choose?
Good question! You’ll need to play around with your campaign to figure out how to deliver the best results for your money, but a good place to start if you have only a limited advertising budget is to launch all of your keywords on exact match only. If in time you want to increase your traffic and you have the budget to play with, add a few phrase matches in and see how it goes. Similarly, if you find you’re getting loads of traffic but no sales via a few keywords, add them to your negative keywords list.

Hopefully that’s given you a bit of an overview of how some of the nuts and bolts work on AdWords. Next time, we’ll take a look at how to write your ad creative. Also coming up in the series: setting your bid price, your daily budget, tracking, launch and management. If there’s something specific you’d like us to include, drop us a line at blog@daily.co.uk and we’ll see what we can do.

Well, if you’ve built your website with SEO in mind you’re off to a good start (and if you haven’t, here’s our trio of articles about search engine optimisation to guide you) in terms of organic traffic, though that won’t be immediate. So now you need to start thinking about actively advertising your site. One of the quickest, and arguably the most measurable, routes is Pay Per Click advertising: think the sponsored links at the top and down the right-hand side of any Google search you do. It’s quick, you can track where every penny goes, and it’s targeted at people who are already looking for something you provide – frankly, if you’ve got some budget to spare (or a free voucher with one of your Daily.co.uk services), why wouldn’t you do it?

So, where on earth do you start?
Don’t go running off to Google just yet – the most effective PPC campaigns are carefully planned, so you need to do some thinking before you sign up. You’ll be needing keywords to target, and it’s going to make your life much easier if you’ve thought about it in advance. The general consensus here is that the first things you should do when you’re considering a new campaign are to settle down with a cuppa and open up a brand new spreadsheet!

That done, you need to do some pondering and some research: think about what sort of keywords and keyword phrases you think people will use to find whatever it is that your website offers. Some things to try:

• Imagine you wanted to buy your products. Now do several searches for them (yes, all of the products or services you want to promote -it might be time consuming, but at least you’ve got a cuppa handy to keep you going!). Similar businesses show up? Fab, you’re on the right track. Make a note of what seemed to work.
• Take a look at the competition – explore their sites and find out what keywords they’re using in their site titles and description. Use these for inspiration
• Is your business specifically local? If so, don’t forget to include your place name – if you’re a hairdresser based in Northampton then ‘hairdresser’ on its own probably isn’t going to get you very relevant traffic, whereas ‘Northampton hairdresser’ is likely to be used by people who live nearby and are after your service: in other words, your target market.

Make a note of everything you’ve come up with so far. This is your starting point.

Expanding your keyword list
Now you’ve got your basic list, you can use online keyword suggestion tools to expand upon it. There’s a good one at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, but it’s also worth checking out http://www.google.com/insights/search for seasonal trends and related terms.

Impose some order on the chaos
By now, you’ve probably got an enormous and possibly unwieldy list of keywords and keyword phrases. So, how are you going to impose order on the chaos? Start by identifying some broad themes – for us, for example, it’s product types: Web Hosting, Domain Names, eShops and so on. These will form your ‘Campaigns’.

You’ll probably then want to break each campaign down further into several sets of related keywords – so, our Web Hosting campaign also includes ‘Linux web hosting’, ‘Windows web hosting’, ‘Low cost web hosting’ and so on.

What next?
You should now have a huge but well organised spreadsheet full of keywords and keyword phrases. This provides the basic structure of your pay-per-click campaign. I’d make sure you’ve got backups, if I were you!

Next, you’re going to need to decide on your preferred keyword match types, write some compelling creative and set your budget and bid prices. We’ll talk you through all of this, plus tracking and campaign management, in future articles, so subscribe to our RSS feed or keep checking back for updates.

If there’s anything specific you’d like us to cover, just drop us a line at blog@daily.co.uk and we’ll do our best!

Keyword Research
A good place to start is to conduct a little keyword research. Think of this as an extended exercise in working out what terms people who are interested in the types of things your website provides will search on. Once you’ve worked that out, you can include the terms in your copy so that your site is right there when they search. So, the first thing to do is make a list. What words and phrases would you Google for if you were after the type of product on your website?

That list is your starting point. From here, it’s really helpful to use a keyword suggestion tool to try to expand on your suggestions. If you have one of our higher end Hypersubmit SEO products you’ll have one included in that, but there are also great tools available from Google and SEOBook. Just type in the words and phrases you’ve come up with and see what suggestions you get.

By way of an example, if I type ‘web hosting’ into Google’s tool it comes up with a list of related keywords. More importantly, though, it also gives an idea of the volume of searches for each term and gives an idea of the level of competition for that term, so I can now run through that list and rank it in order of desirability for inclusion on our website. This is always something of a balancing act – if you sell a popular product or service, the single word that best describes it will be extremely widely used, so while you do want it in your copy you might like to think about using it in a phrase which is still widely searched for but for which there is a bit less competition. In other words, if you’re running the website for a firm of solicitors don’t just put all your energy into trying to rank high in the search engines for ‘solicitor’ – try including phrases which include the name of your town and the type of law in which your firm specialises. There will be less competition for this more specific phrase, so when someone local needs your services they’ll be much more likely to find you.

You’ll also need to consider whether different keywords will be appropriate for different areas of your website – if you offer various products and services, then your descriptions of them should be aimed at describing each item as enticingly as possible – with the most relevant keywords for that particular product.

Keyword Placement
Once you’ve established which keywords you’d like to target for which general areas of your website, you need to work out how to use them to best effect.

We’ve talked before about keywords and the Title tag, so here’s a few other things to consider.

1. Keep it natural
Remember that if your copy is going to impress your human visitors it needs to be clear, informative, and concise. While it’s important to make the most of your chosen keyword phrases, if your site starts to read like a bunch of similar phrases strung together by a few ‘ifs’ ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ you’re going to lose visitors. With a little creativity, you can include keywords and important phrases in copy that flows beautifully, so please – while you’re following the below advice, no torturing of the English language in order to shoehorn an errant word into place!

2. The F principle
People have been shown to read web content in something approximating the shape of a capital F. We scan the title, drop down to scan the subtitle, and then zip down the site with the emphasis on the left-hand side (here’s the science). Broadly speaking, the same holds true of search engines. So, to simplify it, for every single page on your website you need to determine which is the keyword or phrase you most want to rank for and get that as close to the top and the left as you can – without compromising readability. Rate your list of keywords in order of priority and work from this ordered list.

3. Headers
It goes without saying that you’ll use your chosen keyword term as the heading for your page. There’s a little more to it than that, however.

Firstly, you need to make sure that your heading is in text – since search engines can’t ‘read’ images then plonking a graphic, however beautifully crafted and highly relevant, in the most important real estate on the page will do you no favours whatsoever. If you want to include the pretties, use them for background only and make sure any text is overlaid html that’s legible to search engines.

Secondly, try to use the html that search engines expect to see for headings. This is where the <H1> tag comes in – if you put your page header within that tag, it will be recognised as such and should be granted greater importance by the search engines. So, drop in that most important keyword on which you’ve decided and you increase your chances of a search engine realising, when someone searches using that term, that your page is highly relevant. Don’t try to fool them with more than one <H1> tag, though – they’re wise to that sort of sneaky behaviour! You can always use <H2> for subtitles and <H3> for sub headings or paragraph headings if necessary to split out your copy.

4. Follow that F!
Once you’ve got the header and subtitle out of the way, write the rest of your text in such a way that the keywords which you consider to be next in importance to your header and subtitle are closer to the top, preferably over towards the left hand side of the copy. Just work down your list and try to keep your copy as natural and succinct as possible. You can still try dropping in what look like more outside keyword possibilities further down the page, of course.

5. Be bold
If you use bolding sparingly, to highlight important items (like the start of each new point in this list), it will be easier for readers to skim your page and determine that it’s relevant to them. There’s also a school of thought that suggests search engines give greater importance to bolded words and phrases, so a little bolding of your keywords is worth a try. Emphasis on ‘a little’, though – no-one likes to feel they’re being clouted with the bolding hammer every other sentence!

Earlier articles in our Search Engine Optimisation series
Search Engine Optimisation – An Introduction
SEO Tips: Maximising Meta Tags

What’s meta data?
First things first, for those of you that haven’t fiddled too much with your websites – what is meta data? Also known as meta tags or meta elements, meta data is website code that explains what your website is all about – particularly to search engines and people accessing your site from them.

Let’s take a look at the result you get if you search Google for Daily.co.uk:

Google returns, in response to any query, information drawn from two key meta elements for the websites it returns. “Daily Domain name registration and web hosting from Daily.co.uk” is what we have in our Title tag, and “Reliable and fast domain name registration with free website builder including .com and .co.uk domain names. Register your domain names today with Daily.” forms the contents of our meta Description.

How meta Title and Description tags are relevant to potential visitors
When you look at it that way, it’s pretty obvious that you should make sure that your Title and Description tags contain a succinct, relevant, and enticing summary of what your website is all about. You want people who see your site on their Google search to understand immediately who you are and what you do, and to feel encouraged to click the link and visit your site.

Secondly, do you have more than one page on your website? Well, then, you’ll need to make sure that each one has individual Title and Description tags that best reflect the content of the page. Remember that all the time, search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN are sifting through millions of web pages to find the most relevant matches for any search – if there’s useful information on your website, the chances are that they will direct searchers directly to the page containing that information, not to your homepage.

Here’s what happens if Google decides that a what a searcher really wants is somewhere they can find a decent reseller web hosting package:

Totally different from our general results, you’ll notice. If someone specifically searches for reseller web hosting, we want to tell them how great our reseller accounts are, give them an idea of what they include, and tell ‘em where to find these great accounts. These potential customers are after specifics about reseller hosting, not generalisations about our company, so we make it easy for them to see that we’ve got the information they’re after. Do the same across every page on your website and you’ll increase the chances of people who search on terms which are relevant to your website actually clicking the link and becoming visitors.

How Title and Description tags are important for SEO
That takes care of the humans who might come across your Title and Description tags. But SEO is about search engine bots, so there’s a few other angles to consider to make sure that search engines return your site in response to relevant searches.

Firstly, everything above works brilliantly for bots as well as humans – search engines aren’t particularly fond of repeated content in general and prefer to see that meta elements relate well to the actual page content. But there are few more technical things you need to consider in order to truly optimise your meta tags for search engines.

1. Be honest about page content
Just as you won’t impress a human visitor with overly grand claims, you’re not going to convince a search engine that your site is a useful, relevant and easy-to-use resource for potential visitors if your Title and Description bear only a passing relevance to your page content. Keep it short, snappy, and accurate.

2. Include relevant keywords – and use them wisely
You’ll see that in the above examples, the keywords I searched on were bolded in the results, drawing the human eye to the fact that this result fits perfectly with the search. At the background level, the same thing happened with the search engine – it looked at millions of possible web pages and found that this one had relevant information.

To make this work in your favour, you need to decide what the most important keywords are for each page of your website (we’ll cover keyword research in more depth in a future article) and make sure that they are in both your page content and your Title and Description tags. Choose just one or two keywords or phrases per page, and put them as close to the front of the tag as you can without sacrificing readability. Search engines consider the top of the page and the left-most area of a title or heading to be the most important and so attach more weight to it when deciding what pages to return in response to search queries.

3. Keep it consistent
Develop a style for your title tags and stick to it. One good trick is to start with your brand name before discussing the specifics of that particular web page. You’ll get the benefit of a consistent format plus you’ll increase brand awareness – and the more people see your brand name, the more relevant and trusted it will appear.

4. Keep it short and sweet
Search engines will only display a certain number of characters, so if you try to make the contents of your Title and Description tags too lengthy you’ll just be wasting your time as your carefully crafted content will be replaced by a … after a certain length. Much better to write something that presents the honest facts as briefly and enticingly as possible. If you offer a free trial of a product, for example, use your description to encourage your visitors to give it a whirl.

The Keywords Meta Tag
The Keywords tag is a widely discussed topic in the SEO community, since it’s the one that in the past has been most open to abuse by unscrupulous website owners stuffing common-but-not-necessarily-relevant search terms in just to try to show up on as many search results as possible. As a result, the major search engines have put in a lot of work to make sure that a) this practice does not benefit those who try it and b) the Keywords tag carries less weight than other meta data in terms of search engine ranking.

It’s still open to discussion how far the keywords you add to this tag influence search engines, though it’s generally agreed that some search engines place more importance on them than others. However you look at it, there’s really only one guideline to follow:

Keep it relevant
For effective SEO, this should be your battle cry with every aspect of website design and copywriting, and the Keywords tag is no different. You don’t need hundreds of keywords, just a few well-chosen, targeted words and phrases which accurately reflect both page content and likely search terms. Don’t repeat every possible relevant keyword across every possible webpage – split them out and use them where they most reflect the page content. And don’t, for the love of sanity, indulge in the decidedly suspect tactic of adding keywords which you think will be commonly searched for but which have no relevance to your website – you won’t fool the search engines any more than you’d impress a human visitor with such tactics.

It’s an extraordinary amount of money, and it’s not as if Toys R Us doesn’t have its company name as domain names, so why in these times when every other news item seems to be suggesting an economic slide of previously unheard of proportions (and as someone who has just read the post-war diaries of an ordinary housewife, I really do hope we’ve a way to go before we’re all scraping around to that degree!), has the global toy retailer raided the piggy banks to such an impressive degree for a domain that probably only cost a few dollars to register originally?

Well, not being privy to their marketing decisions, I can only make an educated guess, but here, in no particular order, are a few very possible reasons:

To grab casual toy hunters
Toys.com is a ‘go to’ sort of domain, the obvious thing to try if you’re in the market and aren’t inclined to search. It may sound daft, but just as there are a huge number of people who Google for full domain names rather than typing them into their address bar, there are a fair few who type likely-looking domains into the address bar in hopes they’ll end up at somewhere that looks about right.

Memorability.
The shorter, snappier and more relevant your domain the greater the chances of people actually remembering it and typing it in correctly. When you advertise, whether it’s pay-per-click, a multi-million pound tv campaign, or just on your business cards, you want the URL you quote to be something that will stick in people’s minds if they need your services or products, not something that’s awkward to spell, overly long or includes five hyphens. A four letter .com domain that’s completely business-relevant and forms a commonly-used word? Gold dust.

Good old SEO.
One of the first things a Search Engine Optimisation expert will tell you is that it makes a huge difference if your domain name is relevant to both you and your business and what you’re talking about on the page. Having toys.com is a great head start for an online toy retailer – it’s as prime a piece of online real estate as an Oxford Street storefront is offline. But you can apply the same thinking to your own brand domain name and to deeper links, too. For example, all of our URLs include our company name and the product name – like www.daily.co.uk/products/web-hosting. There’s no long, unwieldy strings of gobbledegook here, just a really clear indication to search engines and potential customers alike of who we are and what they can expect to find on that page. And the clearer you make it to both bots and bods, the better you’ll rank in both their eyes. The same is true of blogging, – take a look at the permalink for this post and you’ll see it’s the post title, and that that title reflects the post content. This is far better from an SEO perspective than a page or article number and should be easy to change within your blogging platform.

The oxygen of publicity
Last but by no means least, not only does the company have the perfect domain for its business but now it has a ton of extra publicity because here we all are in blogland talking about it. It’s even made the BBC. That’s a lot of people who now have the right domain (from the Toys R Us perspective) in mind for the next time a toy-related present buying opportunity presents itself. While all of the above are sound business reasons for acquiring the domain and most probably influenced the decision more heavily, I can’t help wondering if all the extra PR has done more to make the purchase worthwhile than any of them.

For more detail on the story, visit the BBC News website.