DOMAIN NAMES
Your domain name is imperative to the success of your website.
You need a domain name if you're serious about being an online entity, it's where you'll direct all your potential customers to. For them to become customers you've to make a good first impression and having your own domain name rather than some long free address will enable you to do this.
A domain name is your own unique identity and always will be as long has you continue to use that name. Say for instance you hosted your free site with a free address and you found that you needed a more advanced host because your website was becoming successful. Visitors and links to your site would know you by the long free hosting URL and you'd have to start promoting your new URL all over again. If you had your own domain name you could change hosts as often as you like and people would still be able to find you simply by typing in your domain name.
Domain names are so cheap nowadays that there's no excuse for not having one. Now that your ready to get yourself a domain name here's some advices to help you choose a good one.
Size does matter
In the case of domain names the smaller the better. Of course short domain names are harder to find but if you can find one it has a number of advantages such as, it's easier to brand, easier to remember and it's harder to misspell.
Easy to remember
Try to get a name that is easy to remember and sounds good. General words are best for this but since these are all gone at this stage you should look for non general names or combinations of general names which rhyme and sound good together.
Relate to your business
If you use keywords which are related to your business industry, you will help your search engine rankings. What's even better is if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your domain name, this way Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.
Avoid similarities
This means you should avoid choosing domain names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these, people could reach your competitors' site rather than yours because they got confused over the two domain names.
.com is best
You should always aim for the .com version of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar. However, if the .com version of your domain name is yet taken, you have some alternatives:
- even if .net domain names were born for network related web sites, they are the most valid alternative to .com
- if you are building a web site for a no profit organization, consider registering a domain name with the .org TLD (Top Level Domain name)
- .biz and .info TLDs are valid alternatives too
- if your activity is limited to a specific country and/or you web site's contents are in a non-English language, you might consider registering your domain name with a country specific TLD:
- .de for Deutschland
- .fr for France
- .it for Italy
- .us for United States
- .and so on...
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