When people are searching online for the Des Moines Register, most of them are spelling it correctly.  In fact, I checked MSN to see how many people searched for “Des Moines Register” last month (May, 2007) and they reported over 17,000 searches.  Another 2000 searches were done for related phrases such as “des moines register online”, “des moines register jobs”, “des moines register obituaries”, “des moines register photos”, and the list goes on and on.

What I wondered, was how many people make a spelling mistake such as “des moines regester”?  MSN reports 72, and if it’s correct that MSN handles about 10% of all searches…that would mean the number might be closer to 700 times per month.  And what do you get when you do that search?  Fortunately, the 3 major search engines list DesMoinesRegister.com as the #1 result.  But what happens to all of those people who thought they knew the address and simply decided to enter it in their address bar?  Well, they land on a totally different site, something to do with freeproductvouchers . com.

MSN also reports another 81 searches last month for “desmoines regester”, so the misspellings are likely in the thousands every month.  Add to that another 51 mistakes for “des moine register” and a few more like “de moines register” and “des monies register”, and the numbers just keep growing.  My recommendation would be for the Register to “register” as many of the misspellings as possible, even if that means approaching the owners who are obviously cybersquatting on their website.  A letter from their corporate attorneys would likely go a long way toward getting these domains back under their control.

I must applaud them for grabbing domains such as dmregister.com, since a fair number of people search for dm register or “dm ia register”, but another one they missed was dsmregister . com.  Again, MSN shows 71 searches for dsm register, so why not own it?  Do you think they own desmoinesregister .net?  If you said no, you’d be right.  And while it might not be a big deal for a company that gets a few visitors per day, when thousands of people are trying to find you…some are going to make mistakes.  The Des Moines Register should definitely own their domain in the .net extension.

Lastly, the Register might want to make some attempts to acquire other domain names that could bring a fair amount of relevant traffic to their site.  How about DesMoinesNews .com, DesMoinesNewspaper .com, or IowaNewspaper .com?  While these would be more difficult to purchase (since they are all registered and parked), they might be worth the investment…especially if you consider that those mentioned here accounted for an estimated 5,000 searches last month.

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