Choosing a Domain Name That Will Brand Your Website

So you want to start up a website?  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.  One of the best things you can do for your fledgling website is to bestow it with an appropriate, catchy, easy to remember domain name. Good search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with domain name selection.  Not to mention your positioning and branding with your customer.

OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it.  Can you still get it?  The answer is a qualified YES.  It’s possible, but with conditions to consider.  However, with a little luck and ingenuity you can possibly obtain the name from the current domain name owner.  But for now, lets look at some alternatives to getting that 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.  For example, if the domain name you want is already taken AND well known, most likely this is not a good idea, because most web surfers would likely just type the non-hyphenated version into their browsers and thus could end up at your competitor’s website.  Not a good strategy.  Also, if you do decide to take a hyphenated domain name, remember to keep it short!  The longer the domain name and the more dashes you put between words the harder it will be for the end user to remember, and therefore makes it more error prone, which could cost you customers who never make it to your website.  Definitely shorter is better.  But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name.

Longer or Shorter?  Domain names can be up to 67 characters long.  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  and has a domain name that tells what kind of website you will be surfing to.  Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking.  In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name.  Remember, keep it short!

Brand Name or Generic  Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name?  Definitely if your business is known by a fairly well known brand name, then you would want to try and secure that as your domain name.  For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes.  Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there.  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.  Think it through and hedge your bets.  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.

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