8 Great Tips To Selecting A Domain Name

8 Great Tips On Selecting A Domain Name

Selecting the right domain name is crucial in the planning stages of creating your website, if you don’t get this right you may limit the amount of visitors visiting your website by a big amount. Choosing the right domain name has never been so important in todays competitive online environment, so listen carefully to what I have to say and ensure you select the correct domain name.

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords

Before rushing into selecting a domain name begin by brainstorming a few phrases, 5 – 9 phrases should do. E.g say your website provides tutorials on how to ‘cure acne’ some good phrases to use in this case may be “cure acne” “stopping acne” “acne cure” “treating acne” and so on. Once you have a comprehensive list that you agree try mixing and matching them e.g. www.curingacne.co.uk , continue to play around with your phrases until you find a good match.

2. Make your choice unique

The worst thing that could happen is for someone to confuse your domain name with a popular website. Therefore never ever select a domain name that is the hyphenated, plural or misspelled version of a hugely popular website, e.g. it would be a big mistake to purchase www.you-tube.com or a similar domain to this.

3. Purchase the .com and any other relevant extension

This is a very common one. Often when people are referring friends to a website the latter part of the domain name ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.com’ can often be mis communicated. Therefore as domain names are so cheap nowadays it doesn’t hurt and its hugely advantageous to purchase both .com and .co.uk (or whatever extension is relevant to your country e.g. .au .fr etc. This doesn’t mean that you have to buy webspace (hosting) for both domains you can simply forward traffic to your main domain name e.g. if you chose to purchase www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.co.uk, you can simply forward or re-direct all traffic going to www.mydomain.com to www.domain.co.uk. What this effectively does is protects your brand and ensures all traffic goes to you and not your competitor who happens to have the same domain name but a different domain name extension.

4. Make it easy to type

Also a really important one. If your domain name requires too much attention to type correctly e.g. www.how-to-make-a-website (the amount of hyphens is just to labour intensive for someone who wants to visit a website). Furthermore try avoid complicated spellings e.g “entrepreneur”; people can often misspell this and end up again on a competitors website, additionally try to make your domain name quite short and concise e.g. www.shoes.com or www.ebay.co.uk, many of the most successful website are always quite short and concise www.youtube.com and www.google.co.uk to name a few.

5. Similarary Make It Easy To Remember

This ties in closely with the above. Its always advantageous to select a domain that is topical and relevant to the content of your website e.g. as I explained in the example, it wouldn’t take Einstein to realize that www.shoes.com would probably be an online store that sells shoes. Furthermore choosing a contextual (topical related) domain name is good for search engines. Search Engines look for topical domain name and order them appropriately in the results. Having a domain name that is closely related to your website content can significantly increase your presence in search engines and will be easier for visitors to remember and pass onto friends via word of mouth but probably more well known these days through email, social networking or chat rooms etc.

6. Avoid copyright infringement

Simply visit copyright.gov to ensure you are not infringing on anyones copyright with your sites name, visit the website above and search before you purchase your domain name

7. Avoid using the following

Probably worth re-iterating on this one. Hyphens make it hard to give your domain name over the phone e.g. www.how-to-make-a-website.co.uk translates verbally to www . how hypeh to hypeh to hpyhen…. You see how that could get quite annoying, or you may alternatively say “the address is howtomakeawebsite.co.uk with hyphens in between each word”, by the time they user goes to to look on the site they may have forgotten anyway and proceed to do a Google search for ‘how to make a website’ and end up landing on .. yes again a competitors website, that’s one potential lead / customer you have lost. Similar point to be made for using numbers, this can also get mis communicated.

8. Be a little creative

Paying too much attention to what search engine like e.g www.homemortgageadvice.com (this is keyword rich and is a phrase often typed in by a lot of people in search engines) and your websites topic (home mortgage advice) is all good and well. However try be a little creative and select a domain name that stays true to your brand but also tells users and search engines what to expect when they land on your website. Using a unique moniker (name) is an extremely effective way to build your brand and enhance your image, the example used above is not as gripping as www.banktree.com.

BONUS Tip

If you do choose to go down the route of using a keyword rich (a keyword or phrase that you know people will type in) you may find the below instructions useful.

1. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Enter your selected phrases that you brainstormed in step 1 into the box labelled Enter one keyword or phrase per line:

3. Enter the character display in the image box labeled: Type the characters you see in the picture below.

4. Scroll down to view the table of results, as you can see this will display the keywords / keyphrases that you entered into the suggestion box, you may see that theire is “not enough data” for your keywords, this is a clear indication that the keyword is not suitable for you to use as this will phrase or keyword will fail to deliver enough traffic. This doesnt mean that your website will not receive traffic as search engine take alot more into consideration than just your domain name, however having a keyword / branded domain name will certainly helpy your chances of appearing higher in the search engine for your target keyword

So here is to your success on selecting a domain name!

Right are you feeling confident? if so learn how to register your own domain name here. And you first step in how to create a website will be complete

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