Creating a domain strategy should be one of the first things you do when developing an overall Internet marketing strategy for your organization.

Organizations should make sure that they purchase multiple top level domains (TLDs) so that they all point to one primary domain name.

What does this mean? 

If your company primary domain name has a .com TLD, they should also purchase the domain rights to .org, .net, .mobi, .biz, .jobs and .info.  You should also purchase some misspellings of your original domain name to make sure that your audience gets to your website.  For example, type in yahoo.org, yahoo.biz, yahoo.info into your web browser.  Do they all direct you to yahoo.com?  Yes.  If you type in yahooo.org with the extra ‘o’ do you get directed to yahoo.com?  Yes.  Yahoo is a great example of a company that successfully implements a domain strategy with multiple TLDs.

Why should you care? 

One of the best mainstream examples of how a domain issue can affect organizations is the whitehouse.com controversy.  If you are trying to go to the White House website and type in whitehouse.com, you won’t find out about President Obama’s latest press conference.  You’ll need to instead go to whitehouse.gov.  A web page designer purchase whitehouse.com first and made it an adult site.  (It has since been changed to another site.)  CNET’s Whitehouse.com goes porn article summarizes this controversy well.

So do you want your organization’s clients and prospects go to a site that is not affiliated with your organization?  Worse yet, do you want to your audience (who may be young children) to encounter adult content instead of your content?  A cybersquatter took advantage of the popularity of the White House to promote his content.  Do you want your organization to fall victim to this too?

To learn more about the benefits of why your organization should purchase multiple TLDs and point them to one domain, I recommend you visit these two posts: advantages of multiple TLD registrations and why use multiple domain names?

Does your organization have a domain strategy?