Even though there are a number of reasons saying you should choose both, the reality is that you are very unlikely to find your catchy domain name available in both. So then our advice would be to choose depending on what your business.
Consider a .co.za domain name if your business takes place locally. If you operate a Garage in George, a Fish monger in Fishhoek, a Dance Center in Durban (ok, I’ll stop) - we would strongly recommend using a .co.za domain name.
On the other hand if you offer your services/products globally, we would recommend using a .com domain name.
Consider also that search engines (read: Google) place importance on the domain name. A .co.za domain will in most cases rank higher on local searches than a .com name would. Whereas it would take a .co.za name longer to appear on a search on google.com.
On the subject of search engines: where you host your site will also play a part; an SA site hosted in SA will rank higher than SA site hosted abroad.
One final point about appearing in Google search results listing; a potential local visitor might be swayed by your domain being .co.za as it tells them you are indeed a local business.
Once your website is up and running, there are some tools you can use to learn about how your website is performing. The tool we are most keen on here at knowMe is Google Webmaster Tools. Please note that both Bing and Yahoo! provide similar tools.
All the Webmaster Tools are FREE - with massive benefits!
After having set up an account you are able from one interface to get the following information:
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Your website has been live for a while; you might have one or two pages listed in the Google search results, but your website is not showing up as number one for any of your keywords. What should you do?
If your website is about your Bed and Breakfast then chances are you won’t appear in the top search results for the query ‘bed and breakfast’ for a good while (and realistically never - sorry to tell you). But that isn’t all bad.
Two things are important when it comes to Google search results:-
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Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has a range of features to help website owners increase their website’s performance. This article is not intended to give a full overview of the features available, but we have chosen a few that we consider more beneficial when starting out with a new website.
You will need your website to be live for you to properly see the benefits of Google Webmaster Tools.
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Google Analytics (GA) is a program that provides you with statistical data for your website.
A quick listing of the main Google Analytics features. GA will show you: -
- where in the world your visitors come from (country, town, suburb)
- how many pages each user visited on your site - the more the better ;-)
- what keywords your visitors searched for
- how the visitor got to your site (which search engine or which website)
The benefits of this information is limited only by your own imagination.
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A Sitemap is similar to an index page on your website. You can set up a sitemap for your website by listing the pages on your website in a file called sitemap.xml. Don’t panic! We’ll talk you through setting up a sitemap below.
The file sitemap.xml is automatically searched for by all the crawlers from all the search engines (Google, Ask.com, Bing.com etc). Simply put, a crawler is a program that continuously follows links from one website to the next looking for new or changed web pages. So if Google comes across a new domain name it will look for the sitemap.xml by default.
A sitemap is generally written in XMl code. Don’t panic! The formula is as follows:
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Once your website is live, the next thing you should do is to tell the world about it. Telling the world about it is relatively easy: - just tell Google about it.
You can check to see if your site is already listed on Google by searching for your domain name using the text “site” before your domain name (eg. site:knowme.co.za). If your website is indexed by Google, you will see all your pages that have been indexed, listed as below:
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