How to Choose a Domain Name That Fits Your Business
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
The quickest way to getting both online and offline traffic to your business these days is by establishing an online presence. One of the steps to establishing a powerful online presence is to choose a domain name that will attract the right customers that your business needs.
Allow me to expound on this subject with some tips you can put to immediate use for your next website or blog.
1. Choose A Name That Describes Your Website
Your domain name should aptly let your visitors know what your website is all about even before visiting your site. In other words, give away as much information in your domain name as possible, leaving no room for your visitors to guess what your website is selling.
For example, if your name happens to be Juli Anderson and you own a hair salon called Julis Hair Salon, get a domain name like, www.julishairsalon.com instead of www.julianderson.com. Seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? But you would be suprised at how many business owners use their personal names as domain names instead of choosing one that specifically describes their business.
Shorter domain names tend to stick in peoples mind. Try to keep your domain name within a range of 13-15 characters.
2. Select A Keyword-Rich Domain Name
It’s becoming increasingly important for business owners to have their websites indexed and ranked well in search engines like Google.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com. And it helps this cause tremendously if you have a keyword-rich domain name. The reason for this is simple: Your potential customers search using specific keyword phrases to find what they’re looking for.
If you have done the research and used these customer-specific keyword phrases in your domain name, more than likely your website will be listed on the very first page of the search engines, outranking your competitors because you had exercised due diligence where keyword-rich domain names were concerned.
Try not to use characters like apostrophes and hyphens in your domain name as this will eventually affect rankings. Just remember getting a keyword-rich domain name is the first step toward ensuring your website will be search engine friendly.
3. Must A Domain Name End With .com?
Well, not really. You could very well use .net, .biz, .org or even .info as an extension and no one would complain, except that you’ll likely regret that decision in the long run.
Here’s why
Websites ending with any other extension besides a .com usually requires extra marketing efforts to establish credibility because everybody assumes a .com extension to be the standard in domain name branding.
Another reason is when emailing, customers automatically assume every company ends with a .com extension and this can be devastating to your business if your customers’ emails keep ending up in your competitors’ database. Most likely your competitors will have .com in their domain name.
Unless you’re intentionally targeting to brand your business as, let’s say, a nonprofit organization, in which case the .org extension is highly recommended, then sticking to the instantly recognizable .com extension is the best way to go. Hands down!
So, don’t rush yourself into purchasing a domain name without first taking the time to research keyword phrases that would be a perfect match for your product or service. You can perform this much needed research at websites such as www.wordtracker.com, www.keywordtumbler.com and www.goodkeywords.com. It requires some effort and time, but acquiring the keyword phrases that are used by prospects and incorporating them into your domain name will pay off handsomely for years to come. Thats what you want for your business.