Choosing The Best Domain Name To Promote Success For Your Online Business
Although it is quite plausible that your great, catchy and money-magnetic domain name will come right from your unforced imagination, you should have a good backup plan. That means having a defined, deliberate thought process to go through should your imagination fail you or take too long. This article will help you to do this important task.
It always helps to define terms up front (and clearly), so let's get a few terms clarified so you can proceed to the fun part. (If you don't think inventing a domain name is fun, you need to lighten up and enjoy the process!)
Navigating the virtual world
Do you know how a domain name works? You may see "Food.com," and start salivating before you even get there, but computers and networks don't use names for addresses, they use numbers. A domain name, then, is converted by the Internets' Domain Name Servers (DNS) into a number than represents a particular computer on the Internet. And, yes, some computers can have more than one domain name. At any rate, the number that the DNS produces for each computer is called an IP (Internet Protocol) address.
The IP addresses administered by the DNS allows computer users to find their way around the Internet by looking for these IP addresses, just like a delivery van will look for your home address to bring the packages to your door. The Internet brings "packets" (of data) to your virtual door in a similar manner, and the DNS makes it easier by using a familiar set of letters (a "domain name") instead of the hard-to-memorize IP addresses. This lets you type www.yourcompany.com instead of 64.68.51.255 or some other number.
Good domain names
Do not choose a name that has nothing to do with your company or your website. Just because Amazon.com got away with it doesn't mean you can. For one thing, company's that came early to the Internet party had time to educate people as to names and everything else. The Internet is now moving much too quickly to afford you much time to explain what your domain name means. Better examples than Amazon would be eBay and PayPal, names that describe in short order what the websites are up to. In other words, if you are selling flowers don't name your site Apples.com. And picking some kind of cute or oddball name makes no sense anymore, and might just confuse your audience.
Good domain names are neither too long nor too involved. The longer the name, the harder it is to remember. Would you be more likely to remember SaveYourData.com or RecoverDataFromYourCrashedHardDrive.com? This is not to say that short names are the way to go, however. You want a domain name that contains a few keywords that relate to the website and/or company focus, if possible.
Keywords and core ideas
To help your site earn higher placements and rankings with the major search engines, try to integrate a keyword or core idea into the domain name. Having a name like JaysAutoRepairs.com will do much better with search engines than JaysRepairs.com. With the first domain name you know the website fixes autos, whereas the second name doesn't tell you what kind of repairs Jay does. This is not very conducive to helping steer the right people to your business.
You may find that some names or combinations of words that are already in use can be modified with the use of a hyphen or two. This is a much overlooked way to get a domain name that otherwise may not be available without the hyphens. If the domain name you want is NorthsideHaulers.com, and it is taken, you can consider using Northside-Haulers.com instead.
What about the actual domain type?
Much advice about naming domains tells you to try getting a .com name before settling for an alternative, such as .org or .net. This gets harder and harder to do as more and more names are being registered. Thinking about the domain angle is changing, and it probably better to rate your domain name on the part that comes before the "dot," not the part after. A good, keyword-rich domain name will be of more value than a lesser word or phrase with a ".com" at the end.
You should also save as much money as possible on the domain names. You can get a domain name for less than $10 from several places, then transfer it for free to some other "parking spot." This saves up to $20 on buying the name from a hosting company itself. A domain name is a domain name, and you should always save a little money whenever and wherever possible.
Self-defense, domain style
Protect your new name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, .biz, etc.) as this will deter others from copying it. If you own JustVWParts.com you can also register any other popular extensions that are available. You can have the secondary domains forward visitors to the main site. One more thing: If you have a name that is often misspelled, you might consider registering a domain in the misspelled version and redirecting that traffic, too. There is a thriving business in registering misspelled celebrity and company names - say, MercedezBenz.com - to take advantage of people's bad spelling and typographical errors. For fun, take a look at what someone did to make a sales site out of "ebya.com," a common misspelling of "eBay."
It is very important to spend a bit of time thinking and playing with words and word pieces when trying to come up with the best domain name for your business. Try to work some keywords and/or core ideas into the domain name. Cover yourself with other low-cost domain extensions, and never stop thinking about what other clever, memorable names might work for you. You can direct any new domains to the same old site, so you don't incur anything more than a very slight cost if you give your customers a number of different ways to find you.
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from dedicated servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit us online for more information.
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