Choosing a Domain Name That Will Brand Your Website
You may be asking yourself “How do I start my own website?”. Well, for starters: One of the best things you can help yourself with in your domain name choice is to develop a strategy and plan of attack. 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.
What if someone already owns the domain name you covet? Can you still get it? It’s Possible. It’s possible, but with conditions to consider. However, with a little luck and enginuity 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? 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 the desired result! 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. So, the shorter the better. Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up. After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic. In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy. 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? Domain names can be up to 67 characters long. At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be. Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com and has a domain name that tells what kind of website you will be surfing to. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. You will want to definitely keep the name as short and sweet as possible, but at the same time let the visitor know what to expect when he surfs to your website. Keep it as short as possible.
Brand Name or Generic Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name? 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.
