6 Guidelines to choose a great domain name

By
Shital,

Stick with .Com’s : Companies targeting specific geographical regions may prefer to register a local domain name (.co.in, .it, .cn) while organizations might want to register a .org domain. However, if you don’t fall in either of the two categories, a .com domain should always be your first choice since most of the people make an assumption that the website would be a .com.

KISS (Keep it simple silly) : Keep the domain name simple and easy to remember. Do keep in mind the following while selecting a name for your site:

  - Avoiding Hyphens, underscores, numbers, short forms or any such thing that can possibly confuse your target audience.

Easy to remember : www.ohwowican’trememberyourdomainname.com – Do not buy a domain name that gets people to scratch their head. Your business can lose so many visitors just because of a complex domain name. For example onli9marketing.com may look cool but it’s a really complex domain name which may confuse people and send them to your competitor’s website because they are simply tired trying to remember the exact domain name.

Ahh, that sounds familiar : Buying a domain name which sounds familiar to an existing domain, or which can be replicated easily by rearranging few letters, is a recipe for disaster. Just imagine, you work day-in-day-out to build a really successful business with a domain name ‘www.startupnews.com’ and one fine day, one of your competitors starts the same business with a domain name ‘www.startupnewz.com’. What happens then? Well, that newbie in the business steals a lot of worthy traffic from your website because you left a gap open.

Word of Advice : If you really like a domain name which can be replicated by slightly twisting the alphabets then it’s better to buy the closest variations as well. This way you can make sure that your competitors don’t steal your site traffic even if your target audience mistypes the domain name (In the above case one should buy ‘startupnews.com’ and ‘startupnewz.com’, just to avoid the confusion).
 
Avoid Copyright Infringement : Businesses usually do not make this mistake, but it’s better to be safe when buying a domain name. Copyright infringement can literally kill a great domain name and your business too. Visit copyright.gov to ensure that you are not infringing anyone’s copyright.

No Spammy domain names : Domain name should be such that helps you build your brand. For example, a domain name like ‘seo-expert-london.com’ can help your website a little to rank on the first page of Google for keywords like ‘SEO expert in London’, ‘ SEO expert London’ but seriously guys is it the kind of name that you want to live with? Not only do these kinds of brand names look spammy but they also have little or negligible branding value.

These were a few rules you must keep in mind to launch a great business website. So, start brainstorming the keywords for your website right away! You can visit www.godaddy.com to quickly check out the availability of a particular domain name and buy it. Isn’t it simple?