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November 18, 2010

Choosing a Domain Name to Get Noticed

An effective domain name is crucial to generating traffic to your site.  While the main rule when choosing a domain name should be to keep it short and concise relevant to your company’s website, there are also a few other things to help guide your decision.

Branding Your Domain

Marketing gurus know the importance of selecting a domain name based on the brand of a product or service.  While you can certainly choose a generic name, however, don't expect too much leverage over your competition.  For example if your product is balloons, a domain such balloons.com at first may be quite successful, however, the initial cost of such a generic brand name may prevent your business from profiting in the near future.  Another important marketing aspect to consider is setting your brand name apart from the competition.  Vague domain names often cause customers to become confused and not recognize who they’re doing business with; thus possibly losing repeat business.

Obscurity is the Enemy

Unless you’re intentionally trying to be incognito, obscurity is never deemed a favorable marketing ploy.  Regard it as your worst enemy when attempting to drive traffic to your website.  To prevent being obscure in a diverse global cyber marketplace, avoid domain names that don’t describe who you are as a company.  Granted a long domain name elucidating your company’s mission statement is the opposite extreme, yet try to balance the ability to remember the domain name, with the integrity of a business name.

Contemplate to Hyphenate

There are some obvious (as well as hidden) advantages and disadvantages to hyphenating your domain name.  While on the obvious SEO benefits, such as your rankings when hand searching for your company’s website, may be easier using hyphenated words, the hidden hand is a bit more sinister.  Novice website owners may not realize that competitors will take every possible advantage to trick potential customers.  Even going to the lengths of setting up a similar domain with or without the hyphen, depending on your original domain.

Top Level Domain

By far it’s best to stick with the top level domain (.com) as it’s most common. If the .com is not available, the .CO maybe. However, ideally you should not accept a suggested domain name after you find the one you want isn’t available because often it’s randomly generated.  If you live outside the United States, then you’ll be forced to choose an extension to reflect the country (such as .uk for the United Kingdom). Regardless of the home country, a level of credibility is gained when using the top level domain.

Redirect

You should always consider choosing several domain names to allow for redirects to your site.  Using the above example, if a potential customer thinks your web address is www.AceBallons.net when it’s really www.AceBalloons.com, competitors won’t think twice about purchasing related domain names to capitalize from your domain by navigating visitors away.  Whenever possible, always purchase all related domain names and set up redirects to your domain.

Over all, keep it simple but make it memorable!

Tags: domain name,  choosing domain name,  selecting a domain name