Fine Tuning Your Domain Name
You may be asking yourself “How do I start my own website?”. Well, for starters: Have you thought about your long term plans for your website? Doing so will be a great advantage in determining the best possible domain name. Just as important as choosing the name for your business, a domain name, the name of your soon-to-be website, is one of the most important factors in your online success. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.
What if someone already owns the domain name you covet? Would it still be possible to buy the domain name? It’s Possible. It’s possible, but there are some things to consider. With some research and hard work 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 If the domain name you want is already taken, consider hyphenating it, as in taking billsplumbingsupplies.com and making it bills-plumbing-supplies.com. Is hyphenating the best way to go? 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! 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 keep it short. 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? 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? Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com When choosing my domain name I wanted something that in a few words would tell the web surfer what to expect from my website. 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. Shorter is better here.
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. Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer. But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website. 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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