The domain name of your website is the very first thing that is noticed by your site visitors. Therefore, choosing the right one should be your first priority while setting-up the online version of your business.
These days, finding a suitable name for your e-business has become much more difficult than what it used to be like a decade ago. For example, try registering any popular one-word/term – Apple, Orange, Car, Home, Furniture, Clothes, Dictionary, blah blah blah…they all are gone! The height is, today, even if you get a two-word domain name of your own choice that makes sense, you are very lucky! Therefore, finding a great domain name is much like an art today, which requires two key skills – “your ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking”.
In this post, i will be discussing 6 key elements that make a great domain name – a domain that stands apart from the crowd!
Tip 1. Short
How will you feel like if one of your friends asks you to visit his website – makequickmoneyfromyourhome.com? Won’t be you just annoyed at the thought of typing those 26 characters in your web browser? Online visitors are usually short on time and they usually have a very short attention span, so having a long URL can definitely create a big trouble especially for the direct/loyal visitors of your website. Now the owner of the above domain(if any) must be bottling up a huge deal of animosity against me! Ha-ha 😀
Tip 2. Easy To Spell And Remember
This tip closely follows the above one – Use easy to remember words/combination of words while creating your domain name. Using terms which are most likely to be misspelt can militate against your brand awareness efforts for future. So, the golden rule is to keep it short, sweet and simple 🙂
Tip 3. Reflect The Nature Of Your Business
Domain names can be broadly categorized under 2 categories –
First, those consisting of words related to that specific niche (also called keyword filled domains or exact match domains)
Second, those consisting of words that have nothing to do with the niche (also called branded domains)
In this point, I’m talking about non-branded domains. While creating one, make sure that you are including only important and relevant keywords and in such a way that reading the domain name makes sense to the reader. Some very good examples of domains belonging to this category include – dailyblogtips.com, basicblogtips.com, myblogguest.com, etc.. These types of domain names instantly convey the nature of their business to their visitors. And the best part is, it is very easy to rank well for your targeted keywords with such types of domains!
OR
Tip 4. Unique/Branded
Although branded domains do not reflect the nature of their business and it’s hard to rank well for their targeted keywords as well, they play an indispensable role when it comes to brand awareness. Some classic examples are – google.com (term ‘google’ has nothing to do with a search engine), amazon.com (does the name of a river fits well for a digital store?), apple.com, etc.. If you choose not to go for the first category, you can always opt for a unique brand name for your e-business 😉
Tip 5. Free From Foreign Characters
Good domain names are usually free from foreign characters like hyphens, underscores, numbers, etc…
The problem – Let’s suppose that you own a domain called a-b-c.com. Now, a returning visitor might misinterpret your domain for abc.com and starts searching for abc.com and finally ends up landing on someone else’s website.
The result – A lost visitor! Besides that, such foreign characters don’t look cool ? Do they ?
Tip 6. End With Dot-com
The dot-com mania is not yet dead! Good domain names should always end with dot-coms, the reason being – most of the people still associate websites that they come across with .coms. So make sure that you set dot-com as your very first priority and then consider other top level domains if your desired dot-com is unavailable.
Over To You:
So, Do you think that choosing the right domain name really matters for the online success of a company? Can you mention any other useful tip that i might have missed in this article? Please share your thoughts.
