Domain Name Considerations That Can Help Bring Traffic
For beginners on the web, the question is “How do I start my own website?”. First: What do you want your website to portray? Thoughtful consideration of your website’s future direction will help you in deciding on the optimum domain name for your site. One of the best things you can do for your fledgling website is to bestow it with an appropriate, catchy, easy to remember domain name. Good search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with domain name selection. Not to mention your positioning and branding with your customer.
You have searched for your desired domain name and it turns out someone else has already snagged it. Now what? But you really wanted it badly. Can the domain name still be acquired? Possibly. It’s possible, but there are some things to consider. However, with a little luck and enginuity you can possibly obtain the name from the current domain name owner. There are other ways to get the domain name you want:
Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com. Is it always the best strategy? Maybe, maybe not. If you want a domain name that is already taken by someone else and is already a well known, well traveled website, this might be a bad move, because users already familiar with the original domain name will just type the original, non-hyphenated version into their web browser, and end up not at your site but at your competitor’s site. Not what you were after! Word to the wise: keep the domain name as short as possible. The longer the name, especially with dashes in between words, the more likely that potential visitors to your site will enter it incorrectly into their browsers, thus foiling the chances of them visiting your website and costing you customers! So, the shorter the better. But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name. 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. 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.StartYourWebsiteToday.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. 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. Remember, keep it short!
Brand Name or Generic The answer here is it depends. If your business is known by a brand name, and it is a well known name, of course it is the best possible strategy to try to register that domain name. For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes. Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there. 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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