How to Make a Final Selection of Your Domain Name
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This series of posts is for the person asking “How do I start my own website?”. To begin with: Strategic planning and long term vision will serve you best in your choice of domain names. Careful consideration of your website’s domain name can pay off in dividends once your website is published online. 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? Can you still get it? Well, let’s consider that. It’s possible, but there are conditions. However, with a little luck and enginuity you can possibly obtain the name from the current domain name owner. Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies 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 the desired result! Also, if you do decide to take a hyphenated domain name, remember to keep it short! The longer the domain name and the more dashes you put between words the harder it will be for the end user to remember, and therefore makes it more error prone, which could cost you customers who never make it to your website. So, the shorter the better. Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up. After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic. In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy. 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? If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name. At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be. Who would want to type it into a browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com and has a domain name that tells what kind of website you will be surfing to. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. When choosing your domain name try to keep it short and concise, and if at all possible let the name tell the story of the site. Shorter is better here.
Brand Name or Generic The answer here is it depends. Definitely if your business is known by a fairly well known brand name, then you would want to try and secure that as your 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. So in conclusion, the first step in “how to start a website” is in the wise choice of your domain name.
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