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Obtaining a Domain Name for Your Infertility Web Site

This page contains information on the following topics:

1. Branding Your Business Name - first criteria for selecting a domain name
2. Branding Your Services or Products - second criteria for selecting a domain name
3. Ideal Types of Domain Names
4. Potentially Problematic Domain Names
5. Will Infertility Keywords Inside Your Domain Name Help Your Search Engine Rankings?
6. Additional Issues and Strategies
7. Registering a Domain Name
8. Brand Extension and Protection
9. Online Tools for Domain Names

1. Branding Your Business Name

One major criteria to select a particular domain name is to brand your business name. With this strategy, you would get a domain name that matches your business name, as closely as possible. For example (assuming the following words were in your business name):

• FloridaIVF.com
• UrologyTexas.com

It's best if the domain name closely matches your actual organization name. Following are some potential problems and solutions with this strategy:

1) Your organization name may be too long to easily translate into a domain name.

This problem is especially prevalent with infertility clinics - e.g. "Fertility and Reproductive Center of New Jersey".

2) The acronym for your domain name is not available.

Unfortunately, most three and four letter domain names are no longer available for .com Domain Names.

Possible Solution - You might want to use a domain name that starts with your acronym, then ends with a relevant phrase. So, for example, using "fcsa:"

• FCSAinfertility.com
• FCSAfertility.com
• FCSAonline.com
• FCSA-online.com
• FCSAivf.com.com
• FCSA-IVF.com
• FCSAclinic.com
• FCSAdoctors.com

You can use capital letters in your Domain Name for your online site, business cards, and stationary. When someone enters your web address, the domain name part of it, won't matter whether it's all lower case or partial upper case and partial lower case.

IHR has assisted numerous infertility organizations with their selection of a Domain Name.  If you want to discuss this, feel free to contact IHR.

2. Branding Your Services or Products

Using this strategy, you would not try to necessarily brand your business name, but rather you would brand something unique about your business. You would brand your competitive advantage. Some examples:

Using this strategy, you would put the product/service into your domain name and add words such as "expert"  - e.g. www.tubal-reversal-expert.com

The best example of this for IVF is www.ivf.com.

3) Brand your business as the lower cost leader

An example, might be affordable-ivf.com.

3. Ideal Types of Domain Names

IHR offers the following general suggestions for selecting a domain name:

• shorter domain names are better than longer names
• less words is better than more words inside a domain name
• write down the domain name and see if it's easy to recognize
• .com is better than .net or .org
• .net or .org is probably better than some of the newer extensions, e.g. .biz

4. Potentially Problematic Domain Names

Be careful when using word substitutions inside your domain name. For example:

• a "4" instead of "for" can be confusing when people try to remember what it was
• an abbreviation such as "ins" for "institute" can be hard to remember and may be difficult to visually understand

IHR doesn't recommend using the following in your domain name:

• "LLC" - who care's what your legal entity is? It's also hard to remember.
   
• "my_____" - add a my_____" into your domain name (e.g., myivf.com) implies that you offer personalized Internet services (e.g. patient charts or protocols). Unless you plan on offering those types of services, IHR doesn't recommend this type of domain name

5. Will Infertility Keywords Inside Your Domain Name Help Your Search Engine Rankings?

IHR has had numerous clients who want to put "ivf" or "infertility" or "fertility" inside their domain names, so that their websites might rank higher in search engines. Here are our comments about this strategy:

• Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts say that having a keyword in your domain name doesn't help your website rank higher in search engines for that keyword. However, search engines don't publish their algorhythms, so we can't be certain about this.
   
• On 12/9/05, a Google search on the keyword "infertility" showed the following:
  • In the top 10 listings, only three listings had the keyword "infertility" inside their domain names.
  • IHR.com (our domain name) was number one, yet the keyword "infertility" is not inside that domain name.
     
• Just because a domain name ranks high in search engines and contains the keyword doesn't mean that's why it ranks high. Most likely it's ranking high for other reasons.
   
• IHR tends to not use this as the main criteria for selecting a domain name. We tend to use branding either your organization name or your service/product name as the main criteria. If it works, into the name, however, it's certainly a nice bonus.

6. Additional Issues and Strategies

• If the Domain Name you want is owned by someone else, but they are not using it, you could try to purchase it from the owner. However, in IHR's experience, the cost to keep the Domain Name is so low for the owner that they typically do not want to sell it, unless you pay lots of money.
   
• Some IHR clients want to point lots of domain names to their website. In general, IHR doesn't recommend this because it can potentially lead to search engine viewing your website as doing "domain name spamming" which search engines don't like. If you want to try this strategy, please talk with IHR first.
   
• If the .com version of the domain name you want is not available, you might try to get the .net or .org version (e.g., "fcsa.net" or "fcsa.org").  However, there are a couple of potential problems with this strategy:
   
  • Internet users don't expect to see this and may wonder why you're Web name doesn't end with a .com. Your domain name will look a little different. IHR does not consider this to be a major problem.
     
  • There may some Domain Name branding confusion. This issue is more important. For example, assume that three different organizations have these three Domain Names: fcsa.com, fcsa.net, fcsa.org and you own fcsa.net. When one user tells another about your domain name, they may tell their friend to go to fcsa.com (the wrong domain name).
    
    If you have mostly an Internet-based business and most of the traffic you get is from click-thrus (rather than e.g. word of mouth referrals or radio ads), then getting a .net or .org domain name will probably be OK, since people would tend to find your site by simply clicking thru from other sites.

7. Registering a Domain Name

There are many registrars that can be used to register Domain Name. However, it is very important that you have online access to easily make the following types of changes to your Domain Name registration:

• Administrative, Billing, or Technical Contact
• Authoritative Name Servers
• IP address of the server that hosts your Web site or email

IHR has had very good experience with using register.com.

After you register your domain name, make sure that you keep your associated email address current, especially so that you can receive the registrar's email notifications when it's time to renew your email.

8. Brand Extension and Protection

You might want to consider getting additional domain names to extend and protect your main domain name. Here's an example of this for barnesandnoble.com:

9. Online Tools for Domain Names

• DomainSurfer and nameboy - Allow you to perform searches on Domain Names. These searches can give you some ideas for a Domain Name. For example your query can be to see all the Domain Names that contain the word "infertility."
   
• WhoIs Query - allows you to enter a domain name and see who owns the Domain Name and also see who is the registrar for that Domain Name.
   
• DeletedDomains.com - allows you to search by keyword for domain names which have expired or on hold.
   
• SnapNames - allows you to back-order domain names which have expired but are not yet released to the public.
   
• URLbuyers.com - You may need to register to use their services.  Contains helpful searches to assist you with developing a Domain Name.