I wish that every time I post, it would be about suc­cesses. But that’s just not the way this blog­ger goes. Suc­cess or fail­ures, here I post. Read on and maybe you won’t have to repeat the same mistakes.

I’ve been strug­gling with the domain name of one of my web­site. This web­site was orig­i­nally called, PaypalDirectory.com. I was happy with the domain name for years. It was the per­fect descrip­tion of what the site was and more impor­tantly, the site was doing well. But there’s one prob­lem, I had become aware I was infring­ing on Paypal’s trademark.

So I sent Pay­pal an email inform­ing them of my site, ask­ing if it’s ok, but received no response. Wish­ful thinking, I took that no response as an ok from Pay­pal and con­tin­ued work­ing on my site.

Pay­pal Directory.com con­tin­ued to grow along with my uneasi­ness with its domain name. My worst fear was that after all this hard work; I’d get a cease and desist notice from Paypal.

I finally decided to change the domain and this time I was deter­mined not to use the word Pay­pal, or any other trade­marked word, in the domain name itself. And since this direc­tory would not be tied to Paypal’s ser­vices, I fig­ured this is my chance to expand the direc­tory to all stores that accept alter­na­tives to credit card pay­ments. But there’s a prob­lem, I couldn’t think of a good domain name that is available.

I thought of the name, No Cards Required, but both the .com and .net are taken. To make mat­ters worse, both domains points to free porn. The .org is avail­able but I didn’t want my unsus­pect­ing cus­tomers to end up on free porn sites. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with free porn. I just don’t want it to be asso­ci­ated with my website.

I set­tled on the name CardOptional.com.  The site was doing well under this name. It was receiv­ing about 3,000 unique hits a month and had a PR rank­ing of 4, all within a mat­ter of months.

But yet again, I have one big prob­lem with the site. I could not get it to show up on SERPs for the key­words that I wanted. I feel the site could do so much bet­ter if I could just get it to show up on SERPs. I feel that the site is doing ok on the weight of its con­tent alone. Con­tent really is king but the king needs help.

The key­words or phrase that I want is “shop with­out credit cards”. After all, my web­site is a direc­tory of online shops that offers alter­na­tives to credit card pay­ments. And what bet­ter way to help my web­site show up on SERP with these key­words than to include the key­words on the domain itself. I would also be able to use the key­words on the title and con­tents. So there it is. It’s decided. The new domain name is ShopWithoutCreditCards.com.

To be hon­est, I had thought of using this domain name before but thought it was too long. In hind­sight, I should have just used it to begin with. I still think it’s a bit long but what’s the point of hav­ing a short domain name if no one can find your website.

I know I’ve lost a lot of indexed pages and valu­able PR rank­ing but I feel chang­ing the domain name would help my web­site in the long run. At least now, I know the key­words I’m opti­miz­ing my site for.

So what have I learned with all of this?

1. Do not infringe on anyone’s trade­mark. Yes you can get away with it bit you will never be com­fort­able with your domain name.
2. A short .com domain name is impor­tant but not if that short .com domain name is mean­ing­less. Try incor­po­rat­ing your key­words into your domain name. It would help you in SERPs in the long run.

There’s an exemp­tion to num­ber 2 of course. I think that a short brand-able mean­ing­less name can be suc­cess­ful but you’ll need to spend a lot of resources (resources that I don’t have) into pro­mot­ing it.

Thank you for let­ting me share; or vent. Maybe my fail­ures can help you in choos­ing the right domain name for your website.