Dear Manager,

We are a professional Internet consultant organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’domain name registration and internet intellectual property right protection. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.

On 2009-03-11, we received an application formally, one person named “Jacques Tits” wanted to applied for the Internet brand “ingenuity” and some domain names through our body.

During our preliminary investigation,we found that these domain names’ keyword and internet brand is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned “Jacques Tits” to register these domain names through us or not? Or is “Jacques Tits” your business partner or distributor in Asia? Currently, we have postponed this application of this company temporarily already. In order to deal with this issue better, please let the principal make a confirmation with me by telephone or email ASAP.

In addition, I must state that we have time limited for one person or one company’s registration. It is just 15 days. If your company files doesn’t resent within the time limited. We will unconditionally authorized the application of ” Jacques Tits”.

Thank you for your cooperate.

I’ve seen variations of this from some of my clients and it appears there has been a very big push by the Asian domain registrars to get more clients.

Normally if there is an opportunity to own a domain name, I say “go for it” as domains are like property – if you are lucky enough to purchase a house in the right area, as the population grows and property becomes scarce, and you maintain that house well, it will be quite a valuable asset in the future. Last year I read that there were officially no more combinations of 4-letter dot com (.com) names available.

Also, domain names can have an impact on how well your website ranks in the search results as well. It’s important to understand that by having a domain name with some keywords in it won’t magically boost you to the top of Google – lots of other work is required to achieve this, but it certainly doesn’t hurt having a few of these domain names up your sleeve.

But like I said (in the property example) above, you need to nurture and look after your domain name for it to have any worth – which means that the domain name should have some relevance to your business or personal life and if possible – attract some interest from others as well.

It is for these reasons I’d say that having an Asian domain name isn’t something most small Australian businesses really need.

The domain would mainly attract the attention of the Asian market and if you really want to focus on this demographic, you should have your site translated into the necessary dialect, then there’s the consideration that China restricts access to a lot of external websites, so even with the translated pages, you still may not get that much traffic.

So while most domains are a great addition for any business to have, unless you’re planning on selling to the Asian market, I think you can let Jacques Tits’ have these domains.

Now, I think that it’s great that an Australian domain name authority is expanding to other countries.  This is a great thing for Australia and reinforces our high level of technical competency in a field that is monopolised by the US.

The Middle East has been the fastest growing country for internet usage over the past 8 years (with a whopping 1,176.8 % uptake… with Africa being the only other country that has come close with an uptake of 1,031.2 %).

It will be very interesting to see how AusRegistry, and the domain industry in general evolves over the coming years.  You can read the full article here.

Now it can be a good thing to try and incorporate some keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines into your domain name. The search engines favour domains that include a keyword or two because it indicates a little more relevance and when other sites link to you, it’s a lot more likely you’ll get keywords mentioned because many websites will use your URL as the anchor text.

But there is definitely a point when you can try and cram too much stuff into a name so that it becomes ridiculous.

Having a website should be designed to make things as easy as possible for your clients, making it easier for you to sell your products. To provide a resource that’s available 24/7 to answer all your clients frequently asked questions so they don’t have to call or email you. To reinforce your brand, reputation and authority.

Having a domain name that is too long doesn’t help achieve any of those things and you’ll often find that:

• It makes it more difficult for people to spell (and the longer the name, the greater the chance that people will misspell it)
• It makes it harder for people to remember
• Sometimes if a name is too long, it will deter people from wanting to contact you simply because it takes too long to type
• It could raise red flags from the search engines and savvy users who are aware that placing a keyword in your domain can be a good thing… but when the domain is very long and appears to include multiple keywords, it can make your site appear spammy

At the end of the day, your site should be an aid for your business, not a hindrance and if your choice of domain name is too difficult, you’ll be seriously limiting your potential success online.

Since 2002 the number of commercial .au names has risen by over 750,000 and Adrian Kinderis, managing director of AusRegistry says

“The growth of .au is nothing short of astounding, .au has sustained an impressive 25 per cent growth each year for the past 5 years”

So what are you waiting for – get your piece of the Australian domain market – call us on 1300 664 643 to secure your domain!

Read more here

Melbourne IT are a great company and I have been a reseller of theirs in the past, so I have no problems with them, although at the prices they charge it’s no wonder they’re doing so well!