Geo targeting... What's all the buzz about? by George Brown

Exactly what is geo marketing. Geo targeted marketing is the latest and hottest item that any small or medium sized local business could stumble across. Lets just say that not every business has a warehouse the size of a football field and wants to sell items all across the world or all across country for that matter. Most local businesses know that its crucial to have a web presence. What they are unaware of is how important the Domain name of the business is. Every company wants an individual identity and most business owners including myself in the past , will chose their personal or company name and add a dot com or dot net to the end of it, giving you something like joesmithinc.com. Wrong,.... wrong,.....wrong.!! Here's where Geo targeting comes in. Unless by chance you have a really highly searched generic term or keyword built- in in your business name , you need to rethink how valuable a domain name that has a geo specific town, city or state or region along with a keyword targeted service name or trade which relates to your specific business. Huh? To put it simply nothing could be more valuable to a business than to have a geo targeted domain name such as newyorkcitylawyers.com or floridarealators.com, orWheverYouservicePlusWhaterveyoudo.... Why is this so important? Because of the way people do searches the likelihood of your JoeSmithInc.com showing up anywhere before page 99,500 aren't that great, where if you had a domain name that had a geo targeted location with your keyword service that you perform your business would have an huge additional advantage over your local competition

Google states that search results pages represent only 5% of the Internet. Thus, owning a keyword-targeted domain offers a business an additional advantage to search results or page rank alone. In addition, other data suggests that between 67% and up to 86% of online consumers reach websites through Direct Navigation, and are twice more likely to make a purchase than those coming from search engines.

The Direct Navigation Industry numbers are eye-opening. The advertising market for Direct Navigation, or “type-in traffic” (refers to Internet visitors who type an address directly into their web browser address bar, bypassing search engines), will reach $1 billion by 2007.



In addition to Direct Navigation, many businesses, including major search engines, are launching strategies for the exploding online local business market estimated to reach $13 billion by 2010.

Other-level domains
In addition to the top-level domains, there are second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to the left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain en.wikipedia.org, "wikipedia" is the second-level domain.

On the next level are third-level domains. These domains are immediately to the left of a second-level domain. In the en.wikipedia.org example, "en" is a third-level domain. There can be fourth and fifth level domains and so on, with virtually no limitation. An example of a working domain with five levels is www.sos.state.oh.us. Each level is separated by a dot or period symbol between them.

Domains of third or higher level are also known as subdomains, though this term technically applies to a domain of any level, since even a top-level domain is a "subdomain" of the "root" domain (a "zeroth-level" domain that is designated by a dot alone).

Traditionally, the second level domain was the name of the company or the name used on the internet. The third level was commonly used to designate a particular host server. Therefore, ftp.wikipedia.org might be an FTP server, www.wikipedia.org would be a World Wide Web Server, and mail.wikipedia.org could be an email server. Modern technology now allows multiple servers to serve a single subdomain, or multiple protocols or domains to be served by a single computer. Therefore, subdomains may or may not have any real purpose.


Official assignment
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has overall responsibility for managing the DNS. It controls the root domain, delegating control over each top-level domain to a domain name registry. For ccTLDs, the domain registry is typically controlled by the government of that country. ICANN has a consultation role in these domain registries but is in no position to regulate the terms and conditions of how a domain name is allocated or who allocates it in each of these country level domain registries. On the other hand, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are governed directly under ICANN which means all terms and conditions are defined by ICANN with the cooperation of the gTLD registries.

Domain names which are theoretically leased can be considered in the same way as real estate, due to a significant impact on online brand building, advertising, search engine optimization, etc.

A few companies have offered low-cost, below-cost or even free domain registrations, with a variety of models adopted to recoup the costs to the provider. These usually require that domains are hosted on their site in a framework or portal, with advertising wrapped around the user's content, revenue from which allows the provider to recoup the costs. When the DNS was new, domain registrations were free. A domain owner can generally give away or sell infinite subdomains of their domain, e.g. the owner of example.edu could provide domains that are subdomains, such as foo.example.edu and foo.bar.example.edu.


Uses and abuses
As domain names became attractive to marketers, rather than just the technical audience for which they were originally intended, they began to be used in manners that in many cases did not fit in their intended structure. As originally planned, the structure of domain names followed a strict hierarchy in which the top level domain indicated the type of organization (commercial, governmental, etc.), and addresses would be nested down to third, fourth, or further levels to express complex structures, where, for instance, branches, departments, and subsidiaries of a parent organization would have addresses which were subdomains of the parent domain. Also, hostnames were intended to correspond to actual physical machines on the network, generally with only one name per machine.

However, once the World Wide Web became popular, site operators frequently wished to have memorable addresses, regardless of whether they fit properly in the structure; thus, since the .com domain was the most popular and memorable, even noncommercial sites would often get addresses under it, and sites of all sorts wished to have second-level domain registrations even if they were parts of a larger entity where a logical subdomain would have made sense (e.g., abcnews.com instead of news.abc.com). A Web site found at http://www.example.org/ will often be advertised without the "http://", and in most cases can be reached by just entering "example.org" into a Web browser. In the case of a .com, the Web site can sometimes be reached by just entering "example" (depending on browser versions and configuration settings, which vary in how they interpret incomplete addresses).

The popularity of domain names also led to uses which were regarded as abusive by established companies with trademark rights; this was known as cybersquatting, in which somebody took a name that resembled a trademark in order to profit from traffic to that address. To combat this, various laws and policies were enacted to allow abusive registrations to be forcibly transferred, but these were sometimes themselves abused by overzealous companies committing reverse domain hijacking against domain users who had legitimate grounds to hold their names, such as their being generic words as well as trademarks in a particular context, or their use in the context of fan or protest sites with free speech rights of their own.

Laws that specifically address domain name conflicts include the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in the United States and the Trademarks Act, 1999, in India. Alternatively, domain registrants are bound by contract under the UDRP to comply with mandatory arbitration proceedings should someone challenge their ownership of the domain name.




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