Picking a Domain Name
If you’ve never chosen a domain name before, or never thought about why you should choose a particlular one from several relevant ones, the following may help you decide which one might be best for your chosen project. There are many different hosting sites out there, www.GoDaddy.com is one of the cheapest, also www.HostGator.com, and you should check the prices before actually buying your domain name - but really there are two stages, assuming you are also going to set up your own website. The second stage therefore is hosting. I’ll probably do a separate post on this (and set myself up for affiliate links etc!), but for now I’ll just say that I currently use D9hosting.com for my hosting, but get my domains wherever they’re cheapest, including GoDaddy.com - BUT I actually (usually) use 123-reg.co.uk to search for domain names - you search first because the domain you first thought of is probably already owned by someone else! Go to several different sites to check hosting and domain name prices, and use the different search engines on each site to see which you like best (some give you more or less suggestions, by adding words to domain name you enter, to give you alternatives) Since these are two different items (domain name and hosting) one way you can do it is to buy the domain name at one site and have your own website hosted at another site - if that’s the cheapest way to do it - it may be cheaper to buy the domain at your hosting site, as it may come free with a hosting package. BUT you may plan to have several, or even many different domains and want to be able to host them all on one hosting account… Yeah, this really needs a separate posting!
So, back to domain names!
- Make it memorable – you want people to be able to recommend it, possibly offline!
- Make it relevant – this can help with getting it in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – but it’s only about 10-15% relevant to your search placing, so don’t spend days agonising! (or lots of money buying one – unless you are expecting to compete with Amazon! – and their name wasn’t originally relevant to selling books, was it?)
- Try and keep it short – easier to type and remember, also looks better.
- Consider using popular letter/number for word substitution – good4u, WhereRUnow, Bsmart etc. as they will make it shorter, and with mobile phone texting they are now more acceptable.
- If you are adamant about a particular name, but it’s already gone… consider hyphenating. It’s less popular, but one or two hyphens are OK, more than that may affect Search Engine ranking. A possible side benefit is that you might even get a little traffic by accident, if someone searches for the existing, unhyphenated name and accidentally puts hyphens in - or just separates the words with spaces…
- Once you’ve decided on a domain name, you might want to consider buying similar names too, so you get all the benefit once you build it up, rather than someone else taking a similar name and stealing some of your hard earned traffic – i.e. if you’re buying the xxxxxxx.com, consider getting the .info as well – or maybe the .co.uk if you live in the UK. COM is still considered the main one though. You may also consider buying misspelled versions (possibly later, once you’re making some money from it) as people don’t always type accurately!