Domain Name - How To Pick One

Picking a domain name should be easy, right? Why, I'll just use my business name. Not so fast, Sparky. A good bit of thought should be given to selecting a domain name.

A Cautionary Note

Picking a domain name is like getting married. You are going to have to stick with it till the bitter end. People that use your site will come to know it by the domain name. Repeat visitors will often simply type in the domain name to get to the site, better known as "type in traffic". As an example, do you search for "Amazon" when you want to buy a book or do simply type in amazon.com? If Amazon were to change its domain name to Desert, there would be a lot of confusion. The same goes with your domain. Once you pick something, stick with it.

Your Choices

Well, the obvious choice is your business name, but it may not be the best. There are four significant issues to consider.

First, is there something about your business name that makes using it as a domain an unwise choice? This situation typically arises if you have a long business name or have plural words. "Halstatt's Rip'n Marketing Campaigns, Inc." is going to be a horrible domain name. Clients are going to find it difficult to type in such a domain name.

Double letter problems are a second issue that is entirely unique to the Internet. What if Sams Salon wants to use its business name as a domain? The "s" at the end of first word and beginning of the second can cause confusion. Is the domain name Samssalon.com or Samsalon.com? Confusing your users is a bad way to run a site.

The third issue concerns the nature of your site and search engine optimization. If you are shooting for a particular keyword phrase, you may be better off using that keyword phrase in your domain name. Google, for instance, looks at the domain name when evaluating a site. If the words in your domain name are spaced with dashes, many believe it will help in the ranking process. This is why you see so many xxx-xxxx-xxx.com domain names on the net. If your business focuses on a very specific area, strong consideration should be given to using relevant keywords in your domain name.

Finally, your domain name should end in ".com" and I don't want to hear any argument or see any rolling of the eyes. The simple fact is that when people think of sites, they always type in .com. Yes, there are other extensions and .us, .net, .biz, etc., may seem unique, but it kills your traffic. Pavlov and his dog experiments had it right. People have been mentally conditioned to type in .com, so don't select any other ending. If you do, a smart competitor will register the .com version of your name to get some free traffic. If you are really lucky, a porn site will do it!

Take a breath before you select a domain name. Like a spouse, it can be either a good or bad choice.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.

Brafton

Domain names without Latin characters will broaden SEO impact Brafton Late last month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced that it would begin issuing internationalized domain names. ... and more »

PR.com (press release)

Gossimer Announced a Transfer-in Domain Promotion to Allow Customers to ... PR.com (press release) From the second day of November '09, Gossimer started offering customers a promotional price on domain names being transferred to Gossimer at a heavy ... and more »

RTT News

VeriSign Swings to Profit in Q3, Domain Name Base up 6% Domain Name Wire (blog) VeriSign, which manages the registry for .com and .net domain names, reported a profitable third quarter. The company earned $53.6 million in the quarter, ... VeriSign Reports 6% Year-Over-Year Core Revenue Growth in Third Quarter 2009CNNMoney.com (press release) UPDATE 1-VeriSign Q3 profit narrowly beats estimatesReuters About this author:Seeking Alpha (blog) all 25 news articles »

The Japan Times

ICANN approves non-Latin characters for domain names GCN.com 16, and by next year, domain names — which have been restricted to Latin characters in the form of .com, .org and the like — could be turning up in some of ... Japanese URLs no big dealThe Japan Times all 4 news articles »

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Domain Name Journal

Domain name auction house admits internal bidding corruption iTWire Domain name broker SnapNames.com has always had its measure of detractors complaining the company permitted dubious practices. ... SnapNames Discovers User Name “Halvarez” Was Employee Bidding on Domain NamesDomain Name News Domain Industry Rocked By Shill Auction Bidding AdmissionTechCrunch (blog) Fraud in SnapNames Auctions?PR-Inside.com (Pressemitteilung) FT Alphaville (blog) all 25 news articles »

SnapNames: Apologies Shouldn't Be Conditional, Especially When You Steal From ... TechCrunch (blog) SnapNames acquires expiring domain names from registries and then auctions them off to interested buyers. When everything goes well people are happy. ... SnapNames Says Former Exec Bid Up 50000 AuctionsXBIZ Newswire Users Accepting Snapnames Rebate Sign Away Right to Further ClaimsDomain Name News all 9 news articles »

Not So Imminent: Domain Names in Chinese Wall Street Journal Associated Press The Roman letter system has in some ways led the way to domain names that might seem puzzling to non-Chinese users, like 51job.com, ... and more »

Radio 1

Say hello to .كوم as domain names go truly global Ars Technica The organization approved the "Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process," allowing a plethora of non-Latin characters to be used in domain name ... Internet Body Allows Use of Non-English Domain NamesBloomberg ICANN Weighs Non-Latin Domain NamesPC Magazine Internet domain names set to appear in non-Latin scriptsCNN International CNET News -PC World -ChannelWeb all 1,357 news articles »

The Next Web

Рhishing for multilingual domain names The Next Web The р in the latter domain name (also in the title, by the way) is a Cyrillic glyph that looks identical to the Latin p. There are tons of glyphs from ...