Domain names are really cheap, in marketing terms. This morning I registered a “dot co dot uk” for two years for less than ten pounds, and I’m sure there are even cheaper places if you shop around. It was for a domain name I don’t need at the moment, but I expect to find a good use for it quite soon. The main reason to get it, however, was to ensure nobody else did.

Have you got domain names registered for all of your main product lines? You should. If you’re thinking “but it’s a pretty obscure name and product, we’ll register it if we ever need it, nobody else will be interested in it”, you’re taking a gamble. Read Why, Oh Why Didn’t I Buy That Domain Name? on E-Marketing Performance for a tale of woe.

There are regular independent updates on each search engine’s share of use, such as June 2008 Search Engine Market Share | Nielsen // NetRatings in E-Marketing Performance, but you need to be careful with these statistics and read the small print. Firstly, they’re usually from the US, and things are different here in Europe. Secondly, they cover all web users, and search engine use may be (and indeed, is) different amongst professional users.

In fact, Google is even more prevalent than its competitors in Europe, and the lead is extended even further in trade and techinical markets. So if your site analytics are showing that 90% of search engine traffic comes from Google, don’t be too concerned that you’re underperforming in Yahoo! and MSN/Live Search. It’s probably about right.

Is one “good” link from an important site worth ten links from lesser sites? Ah, if it were only that quantifiable. In Garbage SEO. Just What the Doctor Ordered!, a short tale from the E-Marketing Performance blog, the author reports some unexpected benefits from seemingly lower quality links. Which just goes to show the danger of trusting in perceived wisdom.

Here’s a reference to something every site should have: a custom error page. If someone mistypes a URL on your domain, what do they see? That little bit of standard “page not found” text? They wanted to be on your site, so you should be giving them more than that. In An Absolute Pointless Custom 404-Error Page, the E-Marketing Performance blog shows how someone has gone to the effort of creating their own error page, then wasted that effort. Don’t do the same.

If your site doesn’t have a custom error page (type in some garbage after your domain name to see) then it’s time to get one set up.

There’s a nice post in the E-Marketing Performance blog today, called Three Easy Ways to Fix Broken Links and Stop Unneccessary Visitor Loss. It shows you how to look for broken links on your web site, and how to fix them - something which is easy to overlook, but easy to do if you know how. Every site owner should do this regularly. (more…)