I often see business people use long, unnecessary links on their website content, in their emails, and when speaking about an Internet address. Three cases come to mind.
- I was at a business to business networking event and a man promoted his new Blogger blog to the group. It’s URL was thesitename.blogspot.com. Not too professional sounding. The same with sites that end with rogers or wordpress.com. There was a time when domain names were expensive, but not anymore. For under $10 a year, you can register your own domain name and then set it to point at your free website.
- When using email, which sounds better – yourname@yourcompany.com or yourname@gmail, hotmail, or yahoo.com? Once you’ve registered a domain, you can use it to give your potential clients an email address that is a constant reminder of your company, instead of promoting a generic email service. And using a gmail address may cause customers to wonder if you can’t afford to do business properly.
- Anchor text is a clickable website link that uses a descriptive phrase as the text. For instance, instead of a link that says ‘example.com/mydirectory/pictures’, using a link that said ‘car of the future’ and having it link to the longer URL not only looks much better, but lets the search engines know exactly what that link is about. Often your site will receive better search engine rankings as a result, meaning it will be easier for your target market to find you. The same applies when sending an email that has links to various areas of your website. Use anchor text for a cleaner, more professional image.
Now take a look at your marketing materials. Could your copy be helped with the use of domain re-directs or anchor text?
Carol