If you’re serious about having a successful website, the first step is choosing a domain name that will serve you well. After a thorough review of articles and blogs on the topic, here are the top 10 points that the “experts” all make about choosing your domain name.
- First, if you’re going to use your domain name an website for your business, especially and internet based business, choose a name that is closely related to the purpose of your website.
- Easy to remember and spell. If the benefits of this tip are not obvious to you, you probably should not be allowed to have a website. <read with a little tongue in cheek> But seriously, you may not get a lot of traffic at supercalifragilisticexpialdocious.com. Which leads us to item 3.
- Keep it short and sweet. Just because they can be long does not mean they should be. How long can a domain name be? Even though there is theoretical length of 256 characters possible in a domain name, the reality is the vast majority of domain registrars limit the length to 63 characters. This only includes the actual name between the www. and the .com. In fact, the www really is not part of the domain name and is not necessary when entering your domain name in a web browser. The dot com is the top level domain (TLD) as are .org, .net, and so on. Besides, shorter names are usually easier to spell.
- Do not use hyphens (dashes). Hyphens can really be more of a problem than a help when you want to tell someone your domain name or have them type it correctly. When spoken, people get confused or miss the hyphens and you miss the traffic.
- Include the top keywords that relate to your site and industry. Keyword research is very important to your success. It will help you get more traffic from search engines and help people understand what your website is about. I really don’t like looking at a website and wonder what it’s about.
- Make it brandable, especially if you’re going to use the domain name for a business. For example, think about some of the most successful website around, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, EBay, Live. Most of these are meaningless words, at least when we first heard them. Facebook and YouTube do convey some sense of what those sites are about. But when you intend to represent products with a name you use for your website, make it memorable and fit it into your marketing strategy.
- Make sure are not using someone else’s name or a copyrighted or trademarked name. The last thing you need is a law suit because you accidentally used a name that was too close to a corporate brand name. Even though whopper.com is already registered, it would not be wise to use hugewhopper.com.
- Know your neighbors: There was once a website with the name whitehouse.com. It was not the President’s Whitehouse website, which was whitehouse.gov. It was a porn website. So when you search for available domain names and find one in the .com TLD, such as mybestname.com, make sure mybestname in the other TLDs (.net, .org, .biz, .info, .tv, for example) are not sites that will steal your traffic or make the people looking for you red-faced.
- Avoid using numbers in your domain name. First, when you tell your domain name to someone, you’ll have to explain whether it’s “2” or “two”. About the only time you should even consider using a number is if you tie your site to a year, such as election2008.com.
- Use good tools to search for the availability of your domain name and to make other suggestions you may not have thought of. Take a look at ajaxwhois.com, domaintools.com, and domjax.com. One of the most effective tools for generating and finding new domain names is MakeWords.com. Of course, the major domain registrars all provide tools for searching available and expired domain names.
