Tips for Choosing a Good Domain Name
These days, Internet has become an excellent method for putting your point forward to the entire world. It is easy to launch a website, given the various tools at our disposal. In the cut-throat competition, it is important to name your website and domain name appropriately. The following things should be kept in mind, while deciding on the name of your domain.
First thing to consider is to name the domain and website with same name. It might seem like an obvious thing, but there are many people/business that are doing it otherwise.
Naming the website same as the domain name becomes important since when people think of your site. If the name of the website is the same as the URL, people will find it easier to reach the site. Simply put, the name of the site is the URL for the site.
This gains importance when you want the customers to reach your business. If they are not sure of the site address, they might end up going to a competitor’s site, making you to lose out on business.
Now-a-days, everyone tends to turn for information to the inter-net. With so much information, you can not expect your customer to remember your domain name and your site name. It is not reasonable to expect your customers to recall your website address and the unrelated URL.
If the domain name is already taken, it would then depend upon how important it is for your business and/or the product to have the same domain name. It takes time and money to build up your name and product’s brand name. Your customers know your product and it would definitely pay in the long run to have the same domain name as your product. In case the name is already taken, it would be better if you can buy it from the current owner of the domain name. You might have to pay slightly higher amount to obtain the domain name.
If you are still to build a name of the product, you can obtain a similar domain name or naming the business same as the domain name.
Even though keeping a generic name for your website might seem like a good idea, trust me, it is not. For example, you might be tempted to name your site ‘mobilephones.com’. The truth is if someone is looking for a cell-phone, he/she would have already narrowed down to a few options and would not be searching in generic terms.
Due to this reason, it is essential to name your domain same as the name of your product. The name of the product should be the domain name since this would be the search name for people looking for product. This would be the case due to easiness of remembering the product as compared to some other name.
There is a debate on the length of the domain name, even though domain name can be as long as 67 characters. A few people are in the favor of short domain names due to ease of remembrance, while others favor the long version which is related to the product making it easy for human memory to recall it.
Most of the relevant and short domain names have already been taken. Therefore, it is advisable to opt for the domain name which is relevant to your product. It is also important to have a meaningful arrangement of the characters so that these are easy to recall.
Including keywords in your site also helps in the case of a long domain name, since most of the search engines use keywords for crawling through web-page. This would help your website to be displayed.
Long domain names can be used but make sure that the name is not too long. This would cause two issues; firstly, it might be difficult to recall and secondly, it will be a big task to type the name.
Avoid hyphenated domain names, as these are cumbersome to type and people tend to leave these out. This might result in people reaching the site of your competitor.
When the website is recommended verbally, people generally tend to omit the hyphens, which would again result in traffic moving away from your site.
The advantage in your favor would be that the non-hyphenated name might already be taken and you can use the name that you want to use for your site.
If you decide to use ‘the’ and/or ‘my’ forms with your domain name, always make sure to publicize the name with use of the option that you are using. If you do not specify, people might forget the prefix and type the name as such. This would cause you a loss in traffic volume.
There is always a question which new entrants to the web-world are worried about; the use of ‘.net’, ‘.org’ or other country specific domains such as .uk, .sg, etc. These users are confused about whether to use these instead of the ‘.com’ domain. The answer to this lies in the type of customer base that you are catering to. If your customers are spread over the world, use of ‘.com’ would benefit you, but if your customer base is restricted to your country, use of the country specific domain would be more beneficial.
The disadvantage of using a country specific domain would be that the people searching might think that you would be catering to only that particular area. Second disadvantage is that when a person types in the name without the extension such as ‘.com’ or ‘.net’, the default site is taken to be the one with the ‘.com’ extension.
In case you have a domain name which does not have a ‘.com’ extension, promote your website with its full name so that the traffic volume to your website does not suffer.
