How to Make a Final Selection of Your Domain Name
For beginners on the web, the question is “How do I start my own website?”. First: One of the best things you can help yourself with in your domain name choice is to develop a strategy and plan of attack. A well chosen domain is a key component to your website’s success. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.
You have searched for your desired domain name and it turns out someone else has already snagged it. Now what? Would it still be possible to buy the domain name? Possibly. It’s possible, but there are conditions. However, with a little luck and enginuity you can still possibly register that coveted domain name even if someone has beaten you to the punch. There are other ways to get the domain name you want:
Hyphenated Names If the domain name you want is already taken, consider hyphenating it, as in taking billsplumbingsupplies.com and making it bills-plumbing-supplies.com. Is hyphenating the best way to go? Maybe, maybe not. If you are dealing with an already well known name, generally the answer would be no, as most web surfers would usually just enter the non-hyphenated version in, and end up at your competitors’ website instead. Not the desired result! Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website. So, the shorter the better. Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up. After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic. In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy. But be careful: the last thing you want is to cause internet domain name confusion because you have decided on a domain name registration that is so close to a major competitor’s name that you end up losing business to them.
Longer or Shorter? Domain names can be up to 67 characters long. At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be. Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com When choosing my domain name I wanted something that in a few words would tell the web surfer what to expect from my website. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name. Keep it as short as possible.
Brand Name or Generic Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name? If your business is known by a brand name, and it is a well known name, of course it is the best possible strategy to try to register that domain name. Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer. But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website. If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name. But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well. People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names. A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike. Think it through and hedge your bets. You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better. A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one. To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine. Good website design begins always with the wise choice of a domain name.
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