Round Tale

When it comes to choosing a domain name, one golden rule of thumb is to keep your selection short and simple.  However, there are some instances in which the longer name can be advantageous.  Don’t believe us?  Here are a few reasons that will help make our case.

SEO Benefits

Search engine spiders love text, and the more you can fit in your domain name, the better.  This shows the search engines that your website is most likely related to the keywords or phrases incorporated in your domain name, a factor that gives you a huge advantage over similar websites that have chosen not to take this route.  It is quite obvious that the longer your domain name is, the more keywords you can insert.  You have up to 64 characters to work with, so use this space wisely and make the most of it.

Easier to Remember than You Might Think

One reason many are against longer domain names is because they can be more difficult to recall than their shorter counterparts.  While this is often true, it is not always the case.  For example, if you just throw a bunch of keywords together for the sake of higher search engine rankings, then not only is your domain name likely to be difficult to remember, it probably will not make much sense either.  One way to get around the memory issue is to incorporate a sensible sentence into your domain name.  Because they have a better flow, sentences tend to be easier to remember.  So if you have targeted three keywords, try composing them into a short sentence and see how they would fit in your domain name.  Remember, you have the maximum size of 64 characters to play with and this could give you the leverage needed to come up with a domain name that is both easy to remember and effective.

Greater Impact

Another reason to choose a longer domain is because they stick out and can truly resonate with your audience.  While the same can be said for a shorter one, a long domain that carries appeal can provide a degree of uniqueness that allows you to stand out from the crowd.  This betters your chances of increasing the popularity of your website and thus, attracting more qualified visitors.  Some of the most frequently visited websites can attribute a great deal of their success to long domain names.

Conclusion

The short domain name offers numerous advantages.  However, when compared to longer ones, the most distinct may be that they are simply easier to type into a user’s address bar.  Because a large number of internet users rely on the search engines to find what they need, that value decreases even more.  When used correctly, longer domains can help improve your search engine visibility, increase traffic and help you stand out from the crowd, all of which are key ingredients to a successful website.

One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.  There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.  Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.  When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.