Tips for making sure your web site has the right address
Choosing a domain name is usually the first step in establishing an online presence and there is nothing more fundamental for a company's web site. Your domain name is your online identity and choosing the right one can spell success.
Here are some basic tips on setting up a new online presence for your business:
1. All the good ones aren’t taken. Don’t get discouraged, there are plenty of good domain names out there. How many different permutations can be created by 10 letters and numbers? The answer is more than you think — over 920 trillion! And that’s only if you use each letter or number only once. There are 10 or more different “top level domains” (such as .com) you can use (see rule #2).
2. Success starts with .com and .net. The top level domains (TLDs) that connote the most prominence and promote best recall are, you guessed it: .com and .net. They also do better in search engine results. But it’s not do-or-die. The company I run, Dotster, enables many successful businesses that have chosen other TLDs such as .org, .biz, .tv, and .info.
3. Go for the obvious. The most obvious route is to use your own name or your company’s name. If that’s not available, try brainstorming a list of words relevant to your business, product or your service. Are you a local business? Adding the geography makes you more relevant and improves search engine results. By process of elimination, you can navigate your way to something novel.
4. Make it memorable. That doesn’t necessarily mean short. The laws of branding apply to domain names as much as they do to product names. Something distinctive while not too difficult to spell can stick in the mind as much as a generic name. Businesses can also cover their bases with more than one domain. Additional domains can address common spelling errors and can be easily redirected to the primary domain.
5. Put two and two together. Two or three recognizable words suddenly become unique when placed together. Dotster customer 16milesolutions.com invented a creative way to convey the company’s unique global supply chain product.
6. Be inventive. Some of the best brands on the Internet aren’t even English words. Think of Google, eBay, Netflix, or even Dotster. New words can offer brevity AND distinctiveness. Here’s a test: if you search for your name on a search engine and get few matches (before you’ve registered, that is), you’re distinctive.
7. Avoid dashes and hyphens. If the name you thought of is taken, it may be tempting to use a dash to find a way around it. Problem solved? Definitely not! Web visitors have been trained to omit punctuation when navigating to sites. At one point it was believed that hyphens helped get higher search engine rankings. This is also a misconception.
8. Watch out for tricky spelling. If you have to repeat the letters to someone because of unusual or counter intuitive spelling, that’s a red flag. Word of mouth is a common way people share good experiences with your site — make sure it’s working for you, not against you.
9. Let your domain name reinforce your tagline (and vice versa): One of Dotster’s customers is www.ansursaddle.com. The name of its product lends itself to a great double entendre, “We have the Ansur.” There’s even the story of the horse who found ‘the Ansur’ for the first time and yielded the first prototype.
10. Sometimes used can be better than new. When the name you want is already taken, the secondary market is always an option. Yes, you will pay more on the secondary market than you do registering a new domain name. But if the name you really want is owned by someone willing to part with it for the cost of a few car payments, that’s money well spent.
Clint Page is president and CEO of Dotster, a global Internet company. For more information go to www.dotster.com.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments