Dialing Down to Your Selection of a Domain Name
So you want to start up a website? Have you thought about your long term plans for your website? Doing so will be a great advantage in determining the best possible domain name. 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.
OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it. But you really wanted it badly. Can the domain name still be acquired? The answer is a qualified YES. It’s possible, but there are conditions. However, with a little luck and enginuity you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for. But for now, lets look at some alternatives to getting that domain name you want:
Hyphenated Names Sometimes it is a good strategy to just take the same domain name and hyphenate it as in turning bobsautoparts.com into bobs-auto-parts.com. Is it always the best strategy? Maybe, maybe not. For example, if the domain name you want is already taken AND well known, most likely this is not a good idea, because most web surfers would likely just type the non-hyphenated version into their browsers and thus could end up at your competitor’s website. Not a good strategy. 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 keep it short. 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.
Longer or Shorter? If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name. 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.StartMyWebsiteToday.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. Shorter is better here.
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. For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes. Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there. 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. So if possible cover all the bases. 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.