Are you stumped on what domain name you ought to give your website? The key to establishing a web presence is your website name. So selecting the apt domain name is of utmost importance, and oftentimes the most difficult. Here are some valuable tips you should think about before you go on to select that ‘perfect’ domain name for your niche website.

Domain Name – Your Online Identity
A domain name is the name that you give to your website. Consider that you have a website called ‘My Name’. People are probably going to look you up by this name. If your domain is different from your website name, they will probably end up visiting your competitor’s site, resulting in you losing a potential customer. Think and choose a domain name that fits in with your own identity. The world will know you by this name.

Keep It Short and Simple
The shorter a domain name, the easier it is to remember and type it in a browser. A domain name that has between 5 and 20 characters can be easily remembered, increasing its recall value in the process, and bringing more visitors to your website. If you get a short domain name, ensure it is a meaningful combination of characters and not an obscure set of unrelated letters. It is advisable not to use numbers in your domain name as this could lead to people typing in the word rather than the number. For example, flowers4u.com could be interpreted as flowersforyou.com and lead a potential customer to a competitor’s website. Dashes, underscores and other character could also cause confusion.

.COM is More Valuable
Every domain name has two parts – the actual domain name, then a dot (period), followed by the TLD (Top Level Domain) or ‘extension’. The TLD indicates the nature and type of your business (commercial, local, international, gov, etc). About 75% of TLD’s registered today are .COM’s. A .COM extension is the most common and valuable for a commercial business, but by far the most difficult to get.

Check out a complete list of TLD’s at http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt

Is Your Domain Name Already Taken?
If your desired domain name is already taken, there are three alternatives for you to selecting another, keeping in mind that you still have to maintain your identity.

* Change name, keep extension (newname.ext)
* Keep name, change extension (name.newextension)
* Change name and extension  (newname.newextension)

Get Others’ Opinions
Once you have settled on a domain name, see what your friends have to say about it. Can they spell your domain easily?  Is it hard for them to remember? Can they associate the domain with your business? Will they get confused with a similar-sounding domain name?

Choose a Professional Registrar
A well-selected domain name will be a failure if it lands in the hands of the wrong domain registrar. There are so many providers out there to lure you with rock-bottom prices and ‘great’ offers. If your desire is to succeed online, it would be good to compare registrars first, analyze their plans, and choose a reliable one that offers you quality services best suited to your business.

In conclusion, select a domain name that will reflect your business and help create an online identity for yourself.  Get this done before you start your site.  Don’t make the mistake of trying to retrofit your domain name to your website.  If you need help choosing a good domain name registrar, see my article on How to Pick Your Domain Registrar.

Tags: .COM, Choose a Domain Name, Domain Name Registration, Online Identity, Select Domain Name, Valuable Tips, Website Name

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:12 am and is filed under Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.