12 Tips for Choosing a Great Domain Name

deanethridge Jun 11, 2012 · 6 min read

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

12 Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

Does Choosing a Domain Name for your site really matter? You better believe it!

Choosing a Domain Name is very much like your street address for your business. How will your clients locate you if they don’t know where to look – or even worse, if they go to what they believe is your address merely to find your company is not there? Here are 12 Proven strategies to choosing a domain name for your business:

1. Brainstorm for 5 of the Best Keywords that fit Your Niche – A lot of times you can come up with a variation of a decent search term that works for your exact niche. For example, if you are advertising and marketing weight loss, you may look for for a domain name that has the keyword “weight loss” in it. I market Talk Fusion and I have the domain www.talkfusionaffiliate.com . Guess what, it ranks number one when someone types in the keyword “talk fusion affiliate”. There are a lot more competitive keyword phrases than Talk Fusion, but brainstorming will help you get some EASY traffic merely by having your search term in the domain. Research “keyword density” and try choosing a domain name that is 60% or higher. Seventy percent of people type directly in the browser address field, while the other thirty percent go through a search engine.” This has amplified the value of domains that are household words, easy-to-remember phrases, or keywords.

2. Make it a dot-com – Contemplate about this question…What is the first thing you think of when you hear a web site address? Does your brain say to you .com ought to go at the end of it? In the United States, most people typing in a domain name will type “.com” by default. With over 70 million registered URLs, the “.com” extension is by far the most popular, with “.net”, “.org”, and ”.info” lagging far behind in popularity, according to the ICANN Wiki. Choosing a domain with .com may be more difficult to obtain, but it will pay big dividends later.

3. Create and Meet Expectations when Choosing a Domain – As soon as someone hears about your domain name for the 1st time, they ought to be able to accurately guess the type of content that might be found there. Choosing a Domain name like Paypal.com, SendOutCards.com, CarMax.com and WebMD.com are a few examples of this. Choosing a domain name like Expedia.com, Amazon.com, Ebay.com, and Trulia.com required far more branding because of their unique names

4. Choose a Domain Name that is Short and easy to spell – Shorter is better. A short URL is easier to remember and far less likely to be misspelled than a long one. For obvious reasons, steer clear of choosing a domain name that by its nature is hard to spell or confusing.

5. Company names and brand names – On every occasion possible, register your business name as your main URL. It’s what people usually look up first when searching for your company web site. You may also consider registering your product/service names as additional URLs. The reason? If you market multiple brand names within your business, they too will be searched for often, and you can also drive traffic back to the main website.

6. Personal Brand Names – Register your own first and last name as your URL if you are a marketing consultant, critic, or other professional whose popularity in your field is critical to attracting clients. Think DeanEthridge.com. You have several possibilities here, and even if your name is taken, try to locate a variation of your name such as deanethridgeonline.com. For instance, you can use your personal name as your business domain. Or, you can point your personal-name URL to a separate business site. Either way, people looking for you are more likely to also come across your business web site. Read “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk about the importance of building your own personal brand. Choosing a domain that has your name in it will pay considerable dividends long term if you are building an Attraction Marketing Business.

7. Defend your brand with additional extensions – While the “.com” extension is the most popular, as a protective measure consider also choosing a domain extension of your original URL. Secure the .net, .info, .biz and similar extensions. If you do business internationally, think about choosing a domain extension, also (such as .co.uk).

8. . Buy up common misspellings of your domain name – That way, you don’t leave traffic on the table – and competitors won’t be able to buy the misspelled domains and tap off traffic intended for your website. You can get your relatives and friends involved, and brainstorm for misspellings of your name or business. Keep track of every mistyped URL. Those are the URLs you want to buy and point to your site.

9. Consider choosing a mobile domain name – With mobile devices becoming more popular, big companies are starting to register and develop their .mobi sites specifically for cellular users. Therefore do what the big boys do and register that .mobi. You may have no plans to build out a .mobi site today. But as mobile usage grows you might be glad you have that domain in two or three years.

10. Avoid long hyphenated URLs – One common practice a few years ago was choosing a domain name with strings of keywords separated by hyphens. The reason? It was thought that you would get higher rankings in the search engines if these keywords were in your URL. This strategy led to some ridiculously long URLs prone to misspellings and confusion. This approach has fallen out of favor recently, as it is not apparent that search engines offer any preference to hyphenated keyword URLs.

11. Stay away from Copyright Infringement – This is a mistake that isn’t made very often, but can kill a great domain and a great business once it does. To be sure you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright with your site’s name, visit copyright.gov and search before you buy.

12. Register domains for as long as possible – A final word of advice: register your most important domain names for a minimum of several years so they don’t expire out from under you. Ten years is best.

The larger domain name registrars will send pre-expiration reminders or even automatically renew on your behalf. Sign up for these protections when available. Be especially careful when using smaller resellers of domain names, since they may perhaps not offer these expiration-avoidance features. More than one small business owner I know has been unsuspectedly surprised by an expired domain. When it comes to choosing a domain hosting provider, I typically Like Host Gator, BlueHost, and GoDaddy for Hosting and domain registration, with Host Gator, Free Blog Factory, and Blue Host being my favorite for WordPress Installations.

For More information on establishing your own personal brand, and building a solid business online visit www.deanethridge.com or email me at dean@deanethridge.com

Other Incoming Search Terms:

Tips for choosing a domain
choosing a domain name
best way to select a domain name
tips to select a domain
choosing a domain tips
choosing a domain name suggestions
choosing a domain recommendations
how to name your website
choosing a domain name tips

Choosing a Domain

Choosing a Domain