6 Tips On Choosing Domain Names How to choose domain names for your business.	1.3/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Esther C Kane September 17, 2008

It's not easy choosing a domain name for your business website. Sometimes your company name is already taken in a domain name, or it's a very long name and you want something shorter for your website. Here are some tips on choosing domain names to help you.     

    1) At this moment (things may change) a .com domain is better than a .net or any other extension. The reason is that most people are familiar with .com and will automatically type in your domain with a .com extension. So, if your domain is flowers.net, your advertising with of course showcase, flowers.net. But what most people will remember is "flowers". They will automatically type in flowers.com and THAT website (the .com version) will get the business that was intended for you.    

    2) BUT, having said that, there is an upcoming glitch in this concept. The glitch is being introduced with Google's new browser, Chrome. You see, one of Chrome's "abilities" is that it provides suggested searches as the user searches AND the searches don't have to be conducted in the search box, they can be conducted directly on the address bar. For example: on Chrome, the user can go to the address bar and type in "name tags" (as an example"). As the user is typing in this phrase, some "suggestions" come up from Google. The suggestions include the first place Google listing for that search, popular websites for that keyword phrase and recent history from your computer for that keyword phrase. SO, if your flowers.net website was #1 on Google's search results for the phrase "flowers" it wouldn't matter if it's a .net site, or .us., or .me, or whatever. Because if the viewers were searching for you on Chrome your website would pop up in that address bar.     

    Of course, it's hard to say at this time how many people will be using that feature on the Chrome browser but if Google's behind it, chances are that at some point in the future, many of us will be doing it. We'll just have to wait and see.    

    3) Try to avoid hyphenated names (like www.cranor-roofing.com) only because most people don't remember where the put the hyphens and it just makes the domain longer. It's true that if the words are hyphenated then the search engines can actually read them but the days when search engines ranked domain names higher because the keywords were in them are long gone. They've gotten much smarter in the last few years. (Search engines I mean).     

    4) Do your best to get domain names that are easy for your customers to spell. If you have to spell out your domain name each time, that can get very old.     

    5) If you've chosen a domain name and it's available, don't wait. Buy it NOW. Even if you're not going to put together a website for a few more years, it doesn't matter. BUY that domain name before someone else does.     

    6) If your budget will allow it (and domain names are so inexpensive!) purchase several versions of your domain. Purchase the .com, the .net and the .mobi versions. This prevents anyone else from purchasing that domain name AND it allows you to grow your online presence later on if you are so inclined.       

      7) Choose a domain name that's easy to remember. It doesn't necessarily have to "mean" anything. After all, how many people know what "Google" stands for or "Twitter"? These are popular yet, what do they really mean? Nothing. But they're easy to remember.      

    Choosing domain names doesn't have to be difficult, but it is part of your business branding process. Once you've established your domain name you'll be using it most likely for the life of your business. So, choose a domain name like you choose your child's name. Choose a name that you like because you're going to be repeating it lots and lots!      

    If you have any other tips for choosing domain names, feel free to comment!

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