10 pieces of advice to choose a Domain name

Domain name is an important part of website. Like your company name, it is one of the first things that people mention when they want to access your website or when they want to mention you. Therefore, we can not arbitrarily choose a domain name. Below are 10 pieces of advice you should consider before choosing a domain name.

1. Make it easy to type

The online success depends greatly on finding a domain name in a simple way. If your domain name is too complicated, it can be typed incorrectly, so many people can not access your website. This also creates conditions for your competitors take advantage of nicer domain names. Besides, you should not use slang (“u” instead of “you”; “4u” instead of “for you”) or words are likely to cause confusion because they makes customers harder to find your site.

2. Keep it short

The shorter your domain name, the better it is because it will help customers avoid or misspelling.

3. Be memorable

Asking yourself how many times you use Bookmark for a website that you accidentally flipped through? Probably not much. Therefore, viewers also rarely use Bookmark to find the website they accidentally flipped through. They only have a habit of vaguely remembering, so try to make your domain name as memorable as possible.

4. Make it pronounceable

You may ask yourself why a pronounceable domain name is so important while many people type it on website or click on a link. Normally, we have positive relationship with things that we can easily say and easily think about, and that includes pronounce ability in our own minds. Therefore, if you can not easily say your domain name, you are also going to lose memorability of customer about it.

5. Avoid numbers and hyphens

You should avoid the domain names in the form of  my-mobilephone-stores.com. Those hyphens make people lazy to type because they are not handy. Especially, when you want to say this domain name to your friends, the hyphens make it harder to say and remember.

You should also avoid adding number to you domain name because it is not handy to type and likely to cause confusion to say. For example, the website “coffee2me.com” is not actually handy. Especially, when saying, listeners can misunderstand into “coffeetome.com”. Therefore, you should choose a domain name which is composed entirely by letters and not be too long.

6. Use keywords

You should use keywords that best describe your business or your products and services that you offer. For example, if you are a chocolate shop, you may want to register chocolateshop.com. It will not only help your website reach the higher ranking on search engine but also makes more sense to your customers.

7. Domain name should be meaningful

When choosing a domain name, you should carefully consider each word creating that domain name which can evoke viewers to know what your website is talking about before accessing into.

For example, when accidentally finding your banner named “interiordesign.com” and another banner having the same content but with the domain name is “JohnDavid.com”. People certainly choose the domain name which makes them easy to know about the website content right from the first time hearing.

8. Research Domain name

If your domain name is already trademarked, copyrighted or used by another enterprise, you probably have to suffer from major legal troubles that not only cost you a fortune but also your domain name.

9. “.com” is the best choice

Nowadays, there are a lot of domain names as well as extensions on the Internet and they have different purposes. Extensions are suffixes, such as “.com”or “.net”, at the end of web addresses.

However, if you have to choose a domain name for yourself, you better choose the domain name with “.com.” extension. If that domain name has been registered, then you can try a little bit different other domain name. For example, if you firstly choose a domain name is “ilovecandy.com”, but that name is already registered then you can change your domain name into “mylovecandy.com”.

In general, you should choose all of chances as you can to have a domain name with “.com” extension. Finally, if you still like the initial name and do not want to change, then you should choose other name such as “.net”, “.info”, “.org” and so on…

You may wonder why? The answer is habit. When typing a website address, almost people often type the website name then add “.com”. Even some popular browser default Shift-Enter meaning that you add “.com” extension after the phrase you typing. Therefore, the domain name with “.com” extension is very popular and easy to remember.

10. Protect and build your brand

In order to protect your brand, you should buy many domain extensions and misspelled versions of your domain name as well. This does not only avoid the competitors registering other versions but also allows your customers accessing directly to your website, even if they mistype it.

Above are 10 pieces of advice which help you to choose a domain name in an easy and effective way.