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Choosing a Domain
Name
By Donovan Baldwin (c) 2006
Whether for business or personal use, before there can be a
website, there must be a domain name, and one of the most
important steps of a search engine optimization plan is to
pick the right one.
So what IS a domain name? A domain name is that thing that
people give you when you ask for their website. anything.com,
for example, is a domain name.
Some things to consider in choosing a domain name are:
1. Keep it short and simple. If your website is for your
business, a short domain name has its advantages. Whether
you want to print it on business cards or display it on a
billboard, making the domain too long or too complicated
may make it too hard for potential customers to catch in
one reading or recall later, if they did not have a chance
to write it down. An exception to this is if you can get a
phrase which will be remembered into the domain name
(Example: buytwogetonefree.com) ...which leads us to point
number two.
2. Make it easy to remember. Your customer won't always
have a pen with them, or maybe they won't even think about
your domain name or website until later. Short, simple,
and easy to remember can be important, but you normally
shouldn't just opt for something like qdipe.com, and we are
about to tell you why.
3. Relate it to your business or organization. If you
sell bicycle parts, try to put "bicycle parts" in the
domain name. This is not only for the eyes of internet
surfers, but for the search engines as well. They use
various factors to rank the pages they visit, and sometimes
the words used in the domain can increase the rank of the
page. This brings up another point.
4. Think about keywords. Although we are not going to get
into Meta tags in this article, keywords are important.
Even if hardly any search engines look at the "keyword"
Meta tag any more, they are still searching the content of
your site for keywords found within the text of the body,
"alt" tags on the images, and "title" tags on anchor text
and other links. Taking number 3 and number 4 together,
the best of both worlds is to have a business name that is
a keyword or phrase relevant to the business and use that
as the domain name.
5. Cute's nice, but...! Some people try to make their
domain name memorable by using puns, jokes, wordplay, or
number combinations. Just be careful. A few years ago I
needed a domain name for a weight loss product. I went
through all the "short" and "easy to remember" names I
could think of, but they all were taken! I then came up
with the domain name NoDiet4Me. It made perfect sense to
me! I went to have a magnetic sign made for my car, and
the lady read it this way..."No 'die' t 4 me" with a lot of
stress on the word "die" and shook her head with a worried
and confused look on her face! The site worked fine and
got a lot of traffic and made me a lot of money, but now I
wonder if I lost any traffic because of my domain name.
6. To dash or not to dash. There have been a lot of
discussions about whether to put a hyphen in the domain
name. I can't honestly answer based on my own experiences,
as I use both, but the consensus seems to be from my
research that it is easier for a search engine to
categorize and rank a site that has a hyphen than one where
the words are run together. Example: chickensoup vs.
chicken-soup.
There is one danger to be recognized if you choose to use
the hyphen. You must make sure it is clearly shown in any
printed advertising or representations, and if giving the
domain name verbally, go to great lengths to make sure that
your listener understands the hyphens MUST be inserted.
Many people are not that internet savvy and will hear "bobs
dash bicycles" and still type in "bobsbicycles".
7. Alphabet soup. Ever wonder what's best? Should you
get a .com or .net? Will it be okay to get a .biz or .us?
What the heck do those things mean anyways and does it
matter? Well, in today's world, most people entering the
internet world are familiar with .com and .net. After
that, they tend to get confused. I will not get into
country specific top level domains at the moment, as this
article is primarily directed at those either doing
business in the U.S. or those doing business worldwide with
a generic type product where a country-specific domain name
would not matter. So, in most cases, .tv, .ws, or .org
will not matter one way or another. By the way, .tv is the
top level domain for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu
and .ws is the top level domain for Samoa.
Just to continue this discussion on extensions for a
moment. When passing someone your domain name whether
verbally or in writing, make sure they see or hear the
extension. To use my earlier example, simply saying, "My
website is bobsbicycles", will probably cause people just
to type in the .com on the end as that is what they are
most used to hearing.
8. Branding. In some cases, a domain name may be
associated with an easily recognized, or branded, product.
Wal-Mart and Ford do not have to worry THAT much about such
niceties as keyword density or "easy to remember" names.
However, if you are working with a product or company which
has or is in the process of branding itself, some of the
information given above about selecting domain names might
not be relevant.
I am going to assume that most people who read this little
article are probably trying to do some SEO (search engine
optimization) themselves, and one of the best places to
start is with the domain name itself.
==============================
Donovan Baldwin is a Dallas area writer and network
marketing professional. He is a graduate of the University
of West Florida, a member of Mensa and is retired from the
U. S. Army. Learn how to get your own domain name and
create an internet business at http://donsdomains.ws .
==============================
Article printed from SiteProNews:
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Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.
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