5 Tips for Choosing the Right Domain

The domain that you choose for your website will affect all of your future online marketing efforts. You can make things very easy or very hard on yourself in subsequent months simply by picking the right or the wrong domain name.

Below are a few ways to know that you are picking the right domain name for your online company.

Your name is short and easy to remember:

Remember that people will be typing in your domain name constantly. In online promotion, there is no promotional tool that you can use to put your domain name in front of your audience all the time. You need to make it easy to remember.

Your domain name describes what your business is about:

Ideally, your domain name should be a long tail keyword that you are optimizing for within the major search engines. Barring that, you should at least be able to make a case for how your domain name describes your business. If you are having trouble, you can look on the Google keyword tool to find keywords that search engines deem relevant to your business purpose.

Your domain name is unique:

Your audience should be able to pick out your business from another without a great deal of confusion. If your domain name is similar to a company that already has a foothold in the market, then you are doing yourself a disservice by naming yourself something similar. You may even be getting into legal trouble if you do this. Do not give established companies the leverage that they need to put you out of business before you even get started. Stay away from trademarks and names that have been copyrighted over many years.

Your domain name has a good suffix:

You should have the proper suffix for the type of business that you are running. Although there are many new suffixes that may give you more leverage with your prefix, .com is the go to suffix that is trusted by most people. You should always try to get a .com domain name first.

Finally, your domain name should be short:

Find some way to shorten your domain name into something that is easy to type. The longer that your domain name is, the more likely that your audience will make a mistake when they are typing it in.

It is also good if you leave out special characters when you are picking your domain name. Try to go for a name that has only letters. Stay away from "l33t" speech as well. Not everyone speaks in letters and numbers, so you can never be sure whether people will get the joke if you replace "e" with "3."

If you follow the tips above, you are sure to have a domain name that people will enjoy typing in. They will remember it as a bookmark for your company, giving you more business as they spread the word among their friends. Remember to make it as easy as possible for your audience to find your business, and you can never go wrong picking a domain name.

 

Aubrey Moulton is a writer for Nethosting.com. In her spare time, she loves to go hiking on local Utah trails and spend time reading.