Green Taxi

If you run a quality, developed website, especially if you are a leading site in your industry, you should always buy the most basic version of your domain name.  I constantly see examples of why to do this, but today came across another glaring, large-scale example.  Buy the most basic version, I mean remove all adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, etc. in the name of your business just in case people are searching for your domain without the descriptive extra word(s).  The most famous example of doing so is the purchase of Facebook.com by TheFacebook.com back in 2005.

The Big Picture, one of the top finance/economy blogs, posted a note about the redesign of the domain TheStreet.com.  However, in the headline, “Street.com Redesign“, The Big Picture referred to TheStreet.com as “Street.com”, without the “The” preceding it.  While the article correctly referred to TheStreet.com with the correct link, the headline is often what people see first and remember first.

Surprisingly, Street.com is a parked site.  And it is not even parked itself but rather forwards to StockResearch.com (parked).  So, not only has TheStreet.com not purchased the most basic version of their generic domain name, but the owner of the domain probably does not even know the amount of natural traffic that Street.com is receiving (all the owner is seeing is the combined StockResearch.com traffic).  With the post on The Big Picture today, a blog receiving montly views of 1 million+, I am sure there were many people who incorrectly went to the wrong site without either The Big Picture or the Street.com owner knowing of this traffic.

In another interesting twist to this story, The Big Picture does not own its own domain name (it uses TypePad.com).  It should also own BigPicture.com as well if it were to take my advice of this domain to acquire the most basic version of your domain as the leading user of that term as a web site. 

I recently told several colleagues of The Big Picture blog as a recommendation for them to follow for financial news.  Unfortunately, since I did not provide a link but rather said the domain verbally, these potential readers could not find The Big Picture by naturally typing in that domain.  This is one example of not passing what my brother calls the “Radio Test” for domain names.  That is, if you cannot navigate to the domain quickly after hearing it on the radio, your business is not yet optimized for the most basic Internet traffic.

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