Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Like most small creative graphic and web design firms, I started out with a big dream and was thrilled to get by business name as a dot-com. SignalfireProductions.com has been our online home for many years now and our business has grown - significantly.

However, as we`re growing, we`re also evolving in our services and clients. This year we`ve boiled the name down to Signalfire. However, in boiling the name down we run into some online identity issues. Signalfire.com has a pricetag of $50K and similar for the .net. Some years back when the domain name grab started in earnest, I did purchase Signalfire.us and have used it as a redirect to my existing website.

SignalfireProductions.com has been a great domain, but it is long, cumbersome and prone to typos (I`ve tried to acquire the typo names as well). It makes giving someone your email address a real bugger. However, Signalfire.us is shorter, but with the strange TLD it may be forgotten easily or loose traffic for lack of credibility.

So here`s the big question:
Do I use Signalfire.us or SignalfireProductions.com?

You could use SignalfireProductions.com as your web address and Signalfire.us as your company email domain. This is a common practice with many larger web based companies. The Signalfire.us page could be redirected to the Productions site or it could be used as a "business card" type of site that would navigate customers to the different important pages of your business site.

If you have been using your original domain for business for several years, leaving that domain for the shorter is not exactly what I would recommend. Search engines, especially Google, give weight to older domains which will help in your search ranks.





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Terry Reeves
Search Marketing Strategies for Small Business      

I don`t feel strongly one way or the other, and that`s rare for me. Either way, I say.....

I would recommend keeping your primary presence at signalfireproductions, because people can generally figure out if they`ve made a typo, whereas if they forget that your site is ".us" or another tld, there`s no way for them to troubleshoot that on their own.

Never give up a seasoned domain - you can`t get that time back.  Google knows this, like Bartimus said.

Strongly agree with Bartimus and yottazoo regading Google ranking of top level domains.

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Chas T.
"You can always better your best."

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