How to Choose a Great Domain Name
Summary - The name you chose should best represent your company and include common search terms. Your company's name may not be the first choice.
About Domains
A domain name is the address to your website. You can register a name for as little as $7/year. Some hosting services will register the domain name for free, when you purchase a hosting package.
FYI: ‘Hosting’ is the place where your website’s files are stored and hosted; the domain name is the address to them. A Server is a computer that “serves” the files to the Internet for view. Hosting and Server are sometimes used interchangeably but this isn’t exactly correct. Hosting is the service of providing, running and maintaining the computer Server.
Keep in mind that a domain name is just the registration of an address – don’t spend too much money on it. $19/year is ridiculous to register a new name. A high-priced name is only justifiable if it’s already been registered and owned by a reseller.
It’s always best to purchase a pre-owned domain name through an After Market Service; most Domain Registers offer this service to buyers looking to acquire valuable domains for their companies in exchange for big bucks from resellers.
Keyword Domains
If possible, choose a name with the keywords someone may type in when doing a search. For instance, the name of this company is ikreator.com, but the main domain name is ikwebdesigner.com.
Why? Because the keywords: web and designer are what people type in when doing a search for services like ours. We own ikreator.com but it forwards to: ikwebdesigner.com. The search engine will likely list our website higher because it matches popular keywords.
Buy Another Name
Along side a keyword rich name, a second name may be needed to represent your company. You may need a name that you can post on your stationery, brochures and other marketing materials. Choose a short, understandable and memorable name; a name without hyphens and a name that is easy to type and not misspell. This name will act as your display name; when typed into a browser, it will forward to your keyword rich domain.
If you need help in choosing the domain name that best represents your company and looks good to search engines we are happy to help.
Buy a domain name with the extension .com
Why dot com? Because this is the most recognized extension. Visitors often assume a website will end with .com, so go with the flow – don’t confuse them if you don’t have to. For some reasons you may want to use another extension. Other extensions include:
- .gov – Government Entities
- .org – Organizations
- .edu – Educational Entities
- .net – Network, Internet Entities
- .tv – Television, Multimedia & Entertainment
- .info – Information
- .biz – Small Businesses
- .us – All American
- .com – Commercial
I would suggest that, if it’s available, get the .com extension as well. Then you can have all the other extensions forward to the main extension. Forwarding options come with any professional domain register service.