So you want to start up a website? One of the best things you can help yourself with in your domain name choice is to develop a strategy and plan of attack. 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.
What if someone else already owns the domain name you wanted? Is it still possible to buy it? Well, let’s consider that. It’s possible, but there are conditions. With some research and hard work you can still possibly register that coveted domain name even if someone has beaten you to the punch. 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 it always the best strategy? Possibly, but 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 what you were after! Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website. Definitely shorter is better. Another school of thought: IF the web domain you want is already taken, IF the owner of the domain name won’t give it up, and IF the website associated with it is non-existent or poorly designed with low traffic, hyphenating the name might make sense after all.
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.StartMyWebsiteToday.com and features a name that in a few words encapsulates the purpose of the site. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name. Remember, keep it short!
Brand Name or Generic Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name? 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. Research your domain name as thoroughly as you can, including looking for generic keywords which could be a good fit as a potential domain name. 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.
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