A Guide To Choosing A Great Domain Name
Choosing your domain name is one of, if not the most important aspect of setting up your new website or blog. Your domain name will become your brand, it is how people will spread the word about your blog or website to their friends & more importantly how they will find you. Many people often already have an idea for the name of their website or blog, but before you part with your money, here are a few guidelines to bear in mind;
Check for your domain name here - DOMAIN CHECKER
1. Keep it short, sweet & simple, preferably under 26 characters although in reality you are allowed many more. However put yourself in the shoes of a customer for a few seconds & see which is easier to remember..?
my-blog-review.com
OR
my-blog-review-and-website-optimization.com
Ok an extreme example I admit, but you take the point I hope..? At the end of the day there are many options available for whatever name you choose, checkout some examples below;
my-blog-review.com - Using hyphens is good.
my_blog_review.com – Although acceptable, underscores are not really recommended.
myblogreview.com – Can produce embarrasing words by grouping & some a lot worse than this example.
my-bl0g-review.com – Replace certain letters with a number zero = o in this example, however it will still read the same to humans, but is very difficult to relay this address to another unless written down.
2. Unless you are choosing a domain name to match your company name, then it is always advisable to have a couple of your strongest keywords in your domain name, this will be of great benefit when it comes time for some search engine optimization.
3. You should always try to get .com as your TLD, it is without doubt the most common & should anyone be unsure of your domain name, they will 99% of the time opt for trying a .com before anything else. Whilst .net & .org are gaining in popularity & currently no longer have any restrictions on the type of website that may use them, .info should really be avoided. The problem is many search engines including Google see this TLD as being favoured by spammers & as such are reluctant to give it high ranking. This is not to say that you will not find any reputable company using .info, you will, but to get a equivalent ranking to say a .com will require much more time as a site using .info needs to prove itself in the eyes of the search engines first.
4. What about the layout of your domain name..? do we opt for all the words strung together with no spaces as in “myblogreview.com” yes this is acceptable & search engines these days are more than capable of decyphering this. However you should excercise great care when using this method as it is quite possible to unwittingly create some rather embarrassing words simply by pushing all the words together! eg Speed Of Art = www.speedofart.com funny maybe, but hardly what we want for our new website or blog. My own preference therefore is to use hyphens (underscores are also allowed) between words, this is immediately understood by humans & search engines alike & best of all you get no obscure terms appearing in your nice new domain name.
Give some serious thought before using an alternative top-level domain. A high percentage of site searches are conducted by guessing a domain name, as opposed to using a search engine. Alternatives to .com can be cheaper, especially .info, but they can make your site hard to find, difficult to remember & in the case of .info can have a detrimental effect on your SEO. Although the use of .org is currently unrestricted, it is inappropriate for anything other than a non-profit organization.
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