Domain Name- Choosing A Domain Name For Your Website

As we discussed in the last post, a domain name is the web address to your website. When somebody types yourwebsite.com, he is telling the browser to go to your IP address. This is the way people surf on the net and this is the way people communicate with each other about webpages.

Yourwebsite.com will become recognition of your business in the coming times. It is important that you choose this name carefully. Here are few things that you should take into consideration when choosing a domain name.

Your domain name should be as relevant to your business as it can be. So a thorough research and brainstorming would be a great help. It is important to remember that the domain can be of any length up to 67 characters. This includes the 26 letters of the English alphabet, numbers 0-9, and hyphens (-).

The domain name cannot begin or end with a hyphen but can contain one or more hyphens.

Using this you should think a list of possible combinations that you might wish to use. This can be achieved by listing words related to your preferred domain name or related to the content of your website.

For example, suppose you are planning a website on online business tutorials. You would list all the synonyms and acronyms you can think about this business and then produce a combination using letters, numbers and hyphen only. Try to produce combinations which are preferably short, memorable, not easily confused, hard to misspell, relate to your business and convey a message about your business of your business. You can also use long combinations which are easier to remember as in howtodriveyourcar.com.

In the example take above, let us brainstorm

onlinebusinesstutorial

onlinebusinesstutorial2007

internetbusinesstutorial

ibiztutorial

ebusinesstutorial

ibusinesstutorial

ebusinesslesons

ebusinessclassroom

online-business-tutorial

And so on. Create a list of as many words as you can.

After you have created this list, you would need to go to a domain name registrar and check whether your chosen domain name is available. If it is not then you would need to alter and adjust a bit.

It is worthwhile here to mention about extension or top level domains ( TLDs). Thers are many available now and you can choose any of them if you wish. Common TLDs and the type of organizations the names are associated with are listed below

.com commercial business domain

.net commercial network

.org nonprofit organizations

.edu educational institution

.gov government agency

.mil military

.info,.tv and.fm are other types which have surfaced lately. While .info is associated with information, .tv and .fm are actually country specific codes but are popularly used for tv and radio organizations.

At the time of this writing .com rules the business world. Most of the business persons prefer to use .com as TLDs rather than settling for .net or .org.

There are reasons for this.

.com domains have an international appeal. They look more credible. .com domains are easily remembered. Everybody who uses internet knows and understands .com extensions. All you need to stress upon is first part. I can afford to write Home for Profits instead of homeforprofits.com every time which would not have been possible if the site was .org or.net. You need to stress on the extension as well in that case.

But disadvantage is that most of the good .com domain names have already been taken. You might have to adjust your name against the availability.

If a .com name is available go for it. Otherwise you can settle for other extensions.

If you plan to sell intangible products, do not go for country code extensions. They are more used for services contained in the country itself.

While use of hyphen can help you to find a good domain name and may be advantageous for search engine ranking but your visitors would have difficulty in remembering that hyphen. They often would type the domain name without the hyphen and would go to other site. If you wish to choose, do not hyphenate more than once.

Avoid using 0(zero) until it is a part of some other number like 500 or 1000.

0 ( zero) is often confused with vowel o.

Until and unless you are pressed do not use ‘2′ or ‘4′ in place of ‘to’ or ‘four’. People will have difficulty in remembering that.

All said and done, whatever you choose can be made popular and pushed into people’s minds by aggressive marketing. But if you stay within the directions proposed, you can use your aggression for building other parts of your business.

Suggested Further Reading and Resources:

• Domain Name Suggestion Tool!
• Domain Profit Guide
• Host Gator

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