Fine Tuning Your Domain Name

This series of posts is for the person asking “How do I start my own website?”.  To begin with:  What do you want your website to portray?  Thoughtful consideration of your website’s future direction will help you in deciding on the optimum domain name for your site.  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.

You have searched for your desired domain name and it turns out someone else has already snagged it.  Now what?  But you really wanted it badly.  Can the domain name still be acquired?  Well, let’s consider that.  It’s possible, but with conditions to consider.  With some research and hard work you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for.  There are other ways to get the 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 hyphenating the best way to go?  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.  Word to the wise: keep the domain name as short as possible.  The longer the name, especially with dashes in between words, the more likely that potential visitors to your site will enter it incorrectly into their browsers, thus foiling the chances of them visiting your website and costing you customers!  So keep it short.  But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name.  But be careful:  the last thing you want is to cause internet domain name confusion because you have decided on a domain name registration that is so close to a major competitor’s name that you end up losing business to them.

Longer or Shorter?  You can purchase domain names up to 67 characters in length.  You could purchase a domain name like thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com which is 63 characters long, but why would you want to do that?  Who would want to type it into a browser?  My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.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.  You will want to definitely keep the name as short and sweet as possible, but at the same time let the visitor know what to expect when he surfs to your website.  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.  Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer.  But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website.  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.  Bottom line, the beginning phase of how to start your own website is choosing the right domain name. 

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