Choosing The Right Domain Name

Quite often, the very first task facing an online marketer can also end up being one of the most important.

I'm talking about choosing a domain name. If you are even thinking about marketing on the web, having your own domain name is as essential to survival as the air that you breathe. It's not even a question of 'if' you need a domain, but usually how many and what names to choose.

Let's focus on the choosing a name part of this important task. There are 3 primary top level domains, .com, .net, and .org. It is always preferable to get a .com name. .net names are OK as well. I would avoid the .org names and other newer extensions such as .cc, .nu if at all possible.

In December of 1999, the amount of characters allowed in domain names was increased to 67 characters total. This opened up a whole new world for domain registration but also gave many businesses more things to think about.

There are 2 primary ways to go about choosing a domain name, and which one you use depends largely on your target market and how you plan to attract traffic to your website.

Let's assume that a lot of your advertising is going to be radio spots, newspaper advertising, or other print media where the person seeing or hearing your ad either has to remember your domain name or write it down. They don't have the option of pointing and clicking. If this applies to your business you want the shortest possible domain name. One that fits well into radio copy. You do not want a name with hyphens in the title.

Let's assume you were in the lawn mower repair business. You wouldn't want to use a name like daves-lawn-mower-repair.com. The problem is when reading the copy, having to stop to tell people to place a hyphen in the name ruins the flow of the ad. It is much better to use daveslawnmowerrepair.com. It is much easier for the person reading the copy to say go to www.daveslawnmowerrepair.com than it is to say go to www.daves hyphen lawn hyphen mower hyphen repair.com. See, it just doesn't fit into a radio ad. It also doesn't work well with print copy as it is far more likely to be written down incorrectly. It is also important when using this type of advertising to use a dot com extension as many people will hear the first part of the name and just assume it is a dot com. If it is a dot net, you will likely end up with a lot of people typing in the wrong URL.

This means ads you paid for will not return the results you expected based on a poor choice of a domain name. People may be hearing your ad, but the name is just too confusing to recall or they just end up going to the wrong web site.

Now let's focus on a business whose advertising is primarily based on the web and uses search engines to generate a lot of their traffic. It is far more important when making use of the search engines to generate traffic, to get a domain name that incorporates your most important keywords directly into the domain name. It is also perfectly acceptable to use hyphens between the keywords in the name and in some cases it can even be beneficial as some search engines will see the keywords in your URL and this can give you a slight boost in the search engine rankings. While I'm still not a big fan of using real long domain names, using names with 20-30 characters, comprising your important keywords can have a major benefit if you are marketing to the search engines. It is also far more acceptable to use a dot net domain. In fact a dot net will not be treated any differently in most cases from a dot com name.

Let's take the name we used above. Dave's Lawn Mower Repair. I would now drop the name dave from the title and try to get lawn-mower-repair.com. The word 'dave' is not a keyword anyone would search for, it is useless in your domain name as far as attracting traffic from the search engines. You can even add more keywords into your name if you wish, lawn-mower-repair-service-parts.com. See how you can work your keywords into the actual domain name?

So the bottom line is you need to know who your market is and how you want to reach them before you even get started. Your choice of domain name can have a major impact on the overall success of your business.