Extra URls etc

[mje]

No doubt a dumb question so go easy on an old man.

12 - 15 years ago when we bought our domain name, we were advised to secure domains with similar words, or generic to our line of business as they could be used to get people onto our site.

Well after renewing them all yet again, instead of leaving them sitting around dormant, how do I use them to my advantage please?

Or did they see me coming back in the dot com days.......

[Mike Hughes]

The basic idea was to develop a family of sites to attract potential customers so that you can then point them in the direction of your ecommerce site.

So in your case (discus tropical fish), you might also have sites on:

- Looking after your discus
- Tropical Aquarium Reviews
- Fishfood for symphysodon
- The Discus Owners Forum

The idea being that discus owners will also spend time on the internet researching fish care, discussing their fish, sharing photos, etc. Having your own sites for them to visit gives you a chance to raise the visibility of your ecommerce site with both potential customers and the search engines and the opportunity to engage with your customers at a different level.

Whether this is worth doing as separate sites or is better off being on your main site is open to debate. Separate sites take a lot of development time and promotion to be succesful and many visitors will look around and leave without even noticing any links to your main one. By putting the content on your main site you're encouraging links to where you want the customers to end up and surely that's the goal at the end of the day.

I suspect 'best practice' these days is to put relevant content on your main site and to take advantage of other successful sites for the rest. i.e. use facebook for social aspects, youtube for video sharing, engage with potential customers in existing fish owners forums, etc.

Mike