What is a URL? Is it the same as a domain name? 

This is a pretty easy question to answer from a technical perspective. Let’s look at Power Pair Marketing’s URL and domain.

https://powerpair.us

The entire string is the URL, or uniform resource locator, and it consists of protocol (in black), a domain name (in blue) and a top-level domain, or TLD, in green. So, https is a protocol, which indicates the port your computer should use. Because this is a secure site – the S indicates “secure” – it uses a secure protocol. The domain name is the name of our business: Power Pair. The top-level domain is dot-us, which is the country code for the United States and requires that we are either U.S. citizens or based in the America. 

Top-level domain names are often a choice a business or organization have to make. For instance, dot-org is associated with non-profits or mission-driven organizations, while .com is associated with commercial businesses. After dot-com, dot-net is the most popular site, and it was originally intended to be a network main site that hosted smaller sites. Two that we find really interesting, especially since our friend authored a book about top-level domain names titled Addressing the World, are dot-tv and dot-fm. These are the TLD’s for the island nations of Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia, which are in Oceania and are about 1,700 miles apart. Tuvalu reportedly makes around $10 million annually from the licensing of the dot-tv TLD, primarily to television or television-related businesses, which is a difference-maker for an ocean-threatened nation of 12,000 inhabitants. 

The name of your business could be easy. If you formed a professional services firm with a partner, your name may be enough. For instance, if you were the firm of Smith and Jones, you could choose smithandjones.us from the available options, or if you were located in and had a strong identification with New York City, you could opt for smithandjones.nyc. However, if you were a divorce law firm, you could opt for sjdivorcelawyers.com. While the name is longer, it strongly associates your firm with your specialty, which could be a differentiator. 

This is a choice, but if you’re working with Power Pair Marketing, we would advise you that there is strategy in selecting your domain name. Clients who are more conservative in their approach will go for a basic name that reflects their firm in a very straight forward way. On the other side of the coin, an aggressive strategy might try to capitalize on an idea and grab a domain like divorcenow.us. That sends a strong message to potential clients about your firm and what it does. 

The part of this that gets confusing is that as part of a search engine optimization strategy, Google didn’t mind those strong messages. But, for reasons we’ll go into in another column, that has changed and now Google typically favors the more conservative name. 

To us, the conclusion is one of style and direction. Power Pair Marketing will help you to work through the details to see what is right for you. If you’re launching a new venture, click the button below and let us help you to find what’s out there and to work on your business’s digital image. You’ll be glad you did.