How To Choose a Domain Name - What You Need To Consider

When choosing a domain name the main considerations are that it will be:

• Memorable
• Rank high in search engines

To ensure a memorable name ideally your domain name should match the name of your website or business. Assuming you've already chosen a memorable business name, when people search for you on the Internet, they'll nearly always enter your company name as their search phrase. They'll only search related phrases if they can't find your domain name that way and hope that you're ranked high enough for them to find you. What are the chances of this?

If you have a business name already then the choice of domain is easily decided...or is it?

What if that name has already been taken or you don't know what extension to choose, i.e. .com, co.uk, org etc. ? I was lucky in that my business name Pain Free Marketing was still available with my preferred extension .co.uk.

The reason this was my preferred extension is that I mainly provide services to people in the UK.

If I had a .com site, this would be less obvious and as a result in a list of search results people might not readily visit my site when they can clearly see that there are .co.uk sites in the list that they know for certain are based in the UK.

Select a domain extension that gives Internet browsers a clue as to what geographical location you provide services to.

But we still haven't resolved the problem of our business name already being used as someone else's domain name.

You can be creative and add a hyphen.

I.e., I have the website domain http://www.leah-graphics-studio.com

This is good in that the search engine can better find the keyword 'marketing' but not so good in that people looking for my services may not recall the hyphen when typing in the domain name and wind up at a competitors site by mistake.

So hyphens are a double-edged sword. They improve your chances of being picked up by search engines, but can be cumbersome and difficult to recall by users.

Sites that sell domain names will come up with alternative domain name suggestions. If your business name isn't that common, you may strike lucky and find the exact domain name you need.

If you want a business name and a domain name

To grab a domain name that ranks high in search engines you could go for a phrase that is highly searched by Internet browsers for items relating to your business product or service. All you do is use a keyword checker tool to see what phrases are searched the most.

Then select a highly searched phrase form the list that you like and see if the domain name is available.

Good luck!