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Our company has a domain name (say example.com). What are the best practices we should undertake? What can we do to avoid well known risks? How can we be as client-friendly as possible?

Some examples:

  • Have both http://example.com and http://www.example.com serve our webpage (client-friendly)
  • Have both http://example.com and https://example.com work (client-friendly)
  • Implement a nice 404 page, including all menus, a link to the main site, and suggestions from a search engine based on the contents of the URL (client-friendly)
  • Buy variations (examples.com, exemple.com, example.org, ...) too so we avoid other companies impersonating us, stealing clients

What else can/should we do to get the most out of a domain name?

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closed as not constructive by John Conde♦ Jan 9 at 12:37

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1 Answer

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First of all, I think it's important to reserve all TLDs you can buy. If you can buy all TLDs for your domain, it's good pratice because you avoid future cyber squatting issues. If you can't buy all domain names, if I were you, I will buy at least .com, .biz, .info, .net, .org and TLDs of your country (.us if you are in the US, .be if you are in Belgium, .co.uk if you are in the UK, etc.). After, you can choose primary domain and redirect (301 redirects) all to it. In order to choose primary domain, I like thinking country TLD (ccTLD) is good for business which stays in your country. For international business, I think .com is the best choice because it's generic TLD.

Moreover, it's good pratice to think about visitors to build a web site because you can give them user-friendly experience. For this point, build short URLs and URLs easy to remember is good. Nice 404 page is also cool stuff.

For no-www and www URLs, I advise you to choose one and to redirect (301 redirect) other to it. Example, if you choose example.com, redirect www.example.com traffic to example.com. You can avoid duplicate content issues. It's also good to redirect index.html, index.htm and index.php to root domain name (example: example.com) for same reason. In my experience, to help you, sites from the US like `no-www' URLs unlike sites from Europe but it's only in general.

I think you can choose to implement https if your business is concerned by security. It depends on it. If you think it can help clients to understand your business is secure, it may be good idea to implement it.

Otherwise, thinking by user-friendly experience is good but thinking about SEO at the beginning is also good stuff for the future.

Good luck.

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Not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK .co.uk (ccTLD) is often the primary domain for small businesses, rather than .com etc.? – w3d Jan 9 at 11:04
I agree with you. I edit my answer to specify how can choose primary TLD. – Zistoloen Jan 9 at 11:22

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