Choosing A Great Domain Name

Before you go out and purchase your Domain Name, consider how important it is to think about the consumers’ ability to remember it, and search engine optimisation. Both of these factors are extremely important components of your internet success but there are other considerations as well.

The world’s largest search engine, Google, gives a great deal of weight to the domain name itself when ranking a website page.

The three most important factors in a domain name relate to branding, ranking, and linking. Let’s take a look at each of these individually.

Branding

Your company’s brand is one of the most recognisable factors to consumers and it should be chosen with care. This also applies to the way it is utilised in your domain name.

Stay away from hyphenated names if possible for your main site. They are very hard for the average consumer to remember. Plus, they tend to link two or more keywords.

Consider the domain name of ‘search-engine-optimisation.com’. Right away, it seems to indicate that the site, and its content, is of little or no value other than to attract search engine crawlers. And it does a poor job of that, as well.

Conversely, just because you came up with a really cute name for your business does not mean it is the best to use it as all, or part, of your Domain Name. For instance, if your company is named Kraczinski’s Krawlers, would you really expect anyone to remember, let alone be able to spell, kraczinskiskrawlers.com? And when a search engine spider crawls that domain name, does the name indicate what category that business might be in?

Go with the happy medium between obvious keyword stuffing and a reliance on a difficult to remember name in your URL for the best results.

Search Engine Ranking

There is a value to using keywords in your domain name, and search engines do rank your page higher if it includes at least part of an applicable keyword(s).

One easy way to do this, without being obvious about stuffing, is to use a keyword and then add another word or term. Think of Travelocity, for instance. They used the very popular keyword ‘travel’ and combined it with another set of letters to make a new term. This ties in nicely with the above considerations for branding, thereby killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Of course, the first step in successfully creating a domain name in this manner is to determine what keywords are most popular for your type of business or industry. Chances are the plain old domain name of keyword.com will already be taken.

Should My Domain Name Be A .com?

The dot com website name might be considered most relevant but it’s not always available. You might consider using your preferred keyword and another term with an alternate ending to the more popular dot com.

A URL ending in .net, org, or even .biz can be effective, and cost quite a bit less. If the .com is available, it’s most often advisable to go with it. You might also consider your local extension as well such as .com.au, .ca, or .co.uk.

Linking

No matter what domain name you choose, make sure that it is easily linked to,  and that the URL is not inadvertently transposed or changed to a competitor’s. Nothing could be worse than giving your marketing efforts away to the competition.

URL

Beyond the Domain Name, consider the way you name your pages. Your page names, used in your naming convention will add more SEO weight to your pages as well. For instance, instead of using yourname.com/123.html, consider using something like: yourname.com/buy_widgets_online.htm.

Before you go blindly into the process of buying a domain name because it appeals to you personally, consider all of these factors for memorability and maximum SEO potential.