Your Domain Name, the Marriage of Your Business to the Internet

Choosing your domain name has a lot in common with getting married. The name you choose will be the one you will be tied to until the end. Your visitors to your site will begin to know your site as your domain name, just like many people get referred to by their last names. Regular visitors to your site will often simply type in your domain name to get to your site, this is called ‘type in traffic’. People that want to go to my space often simply type in my space, or sometimes myspace.com, however should My Space change their name to My Area, or My Room, there would be mass confusion. The moral to that little story is this: once a name is chosen, stick to it.

There are four things to consider before you choose your business name as your domain name. It may seem like the obvious choice, but there are some issues that may arise with it. Before making your business name your domain name ask yourself if there is anything about it that would make it a bad choice for your domain name. For instance if your business name is a very long name or has plural words involved. “Betty’s Beautiful Butter Creamery” is going to make a terrible domain name. Your clients will not want to have to type in a name that they themselves have trouble saying, let alone remembering.

Double letters pose their own unique problem for domain names. Dilbert’s Singles Bar would cause problems as a domain name, the ‘s’ at the end of Dilbert’s and the ‘S’ at the beginning of singles will cause confusion. Would it be Dilbertssingles.com or Dilbertsingles.com? Using a name that causes confusion for your users is not the best way to bring back traffic to your site.

The nature of your site can affect how you are brought up by search engines. If you are wanting to use a particular keyword phrase, you may want to consider using the phrase in your domain name. Many search engines look at the domain name when evaluating a site. Many believe that if the words in a domain name are spaced with dashes that it will help with ranking process. This explains why many names you see will appear as xxx-cccc-uuu.com on the net. If you will focus your business on a specific area you should also consider using relevant keywords in your domain name.

The .com at the end of domain names is the holy grail of site names. Here is where you want forget being unique and stick with the oldie but a goodie. Yes, you could use extensions such as .us, .net, .biz, and so on, but it is an instance homicide to your traffic. Think about it, have you ever automatically typed in .net after a domain name? Chances are probably not. Everyone and their grandmother automatically gravitate toward .com. It has been seared into our brains that everything on the net should end in .com. So instead of shooting for unique and choosing anything other than .com, consider this, a smart competitor will swoop in and use the same domain name with the .com and get some free traffic. Is unique worth all of the traffic you would be losing?

Relax, take your time, and create a domain name that will be memorable, easy, and that you will not mind having for years to come. It is the marriage of your business to the internet after all.