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The Right Domain Name Matters
TEN Crucial Considerations for Choosing Your Domain Name
By Sandi Hunter
As Alberta's second largest domain hosting company, my staff at Worldprofit conduct searches for available domain names every day on behalf of our customers. I realise more every day how smart people were to book their domain names years ago. Many times a customer submits to us their first choice for a domain name only to find it is not available and they have had to settle for name less effective and less desirable.
However, if you are just now booking a domain name here are some important considerations.
1. The domain name you choose should be related to what your site is going to be about but not limit you should you wish to add products and services in the future. If our business has been a shoe store for five years and you plan on always selling shoes, then pick a domain name that is a good combination of your business name and/or the theme of the site. If your business name is Whipple Shoes Inc;, then the logical domain name is www.WhippleShoes.com - no need to add the Inc.
2. Choose a short domain name whenever possible. People have a lot to remember these days. The shorter your domain name the better able they will be to remember it and access your site. Many large corporations that had previously book long names have now booked a domain name shorter in length. DejaNews.com already a domain name short in length, move to just deja.com earlier this year. One caution here though when trying to shorten your domain name, when possible avoid acronyms. If your business is called Bear Hauling Ltd., a better choice of domain name would be www.bearhauling.com than www.bhl.com. Using your business name in the domain name itself may also lend more favourable results in search engines as the actual name is used and not an abbreviation or acronym.
3. Your domain name should be easy to spell. Choosing a domain name that can be spelled easily avoids people making mistakes with incorrect spelling when typing the address into their browser causing them to land on someone else's site or get a 'cannot locate' error.
4. Pick a domain name that is easy to say. When talking to a customer or prospect by phone and you suggest that they go to you web site it is better if the domain name can be spoken easily and understood easily. For example if your domain name is www.24hours.com this could be mistaken for www.twentyfourhours.com or www.twenty-fourhours.com.
5. If at all possible try and avoid hyphens or a dash in your domain name. If a competing site has not used a hphen and you have, chances are they are going to be getting some of your traffic if your prospects/customers forget to include the dash when they type in your domain name incorrectly in their browser.
6. Choose a domain name that ends with .com if at all possible. Unless you have very strong reasons to want to choose a country or provincial name, example, Worldprofit.ca (the ca stands for Canada). A provincial name extension is www.worldprofit.ab.ca. . The .ab stands for Alberta, the .ca for Canada. Since Worldprofit is an international company it achieves no significant benefit from being labelled in such a manner. In fact, the domain name written t his way is problematic for the customer in remembering the address and this is not beneficial for the company.
7. Most people recognise and remember a domain address with the .com over .uk, or .ca or .net or .org. If you really want to be certain your don’t lose any traffic over your domain name choice, register the country and provincial and net version of your base domain address and redirect visitors to those sites to your core or base.com domain address.
8. Make sure the domain name you select doesn't limit your growth in the future. I know a number of people who registered a domain name related to just one product. Later on they wanted to add products to the site and sell advertising but they found their domain name too limiting so they had to register another domain address. Not a big deal but the more sites you have the more difficult to manage and the more expense.
9. Consider the purpose of your site. If the site is going to be used solely to market the products and services of your business then you will do fine to register your domain name as www.cashtravel.com but if you plant o make your site a theme site with advertising revenue from promotion of other business' products and services you would be better to register ww.worldtravel.com so that you are not limited in the name and can advertise other travel serves, sites and offers at your site as a source of revenue.
10. Remember that when you have a domain your site is accessible worldwide, so unless you for some reason have to limit your market to Small Town, Alberta, don't book the domain name smalltowntravel.com better to be just travel.com if you are after the world market.
11. Pick a domain name that you can live with for a long time. If you promote your site in print and on the web you are generating traffic to that address. If you change the address two years from now, and don't renew our ownership of the domain name, the new owner will be getting your hard earned traffic.
If you want to check the availabiility of your domain name choice, go to: http://www.networksolutions.com and enter your name and chose the ending, example .com
About the author: Sandi Hunter is the Director of Web Site Development and Research at Worldprofit Inc;, at http://www.worldprofit.com. Contact Sandi at sandi@worldprofit.com
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