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How to choose a domain name

Guest post by: Warren Wooden

Article Overview: If you're just about to embark on the online journey of owning and running a website or blog, then the very first step, which is also quite an important one, is choosing a domain name. You might think that this step would require very little thought, however in order to set yourself up for success right from the beginning, it's important to invest the time into researching and choosing the best domain name possible.

How to choose a domain name

If you're just about to embark on the online journey of owning and running a website or blog, then the very first step, which is also quite an important one, is choosing a domain name. You might think that this step would require very little thought, however in order to set yourself up for success right from the beginning, it's important to invest the time into researching and choosing the best domain name possible. One consideration is whether or not to go with a dot com, .net, .org, or some other variation that happens to be available these days. It is my recommendation that whenever possible you should always try to choose the .com version of any domain. People will invariably always add .com to the end rather than anything else if they're unsure. Now while this might not result in a ton of lost traffic, even if you lose a handful each month, that is a handful too many! Another consideration is the fact that .com has a higher perceived value than all of the others.

Another consideration when looking into a domain name is whether or not to hyphenate two or more words, there are some who think that separating two or more words with a hyphen can either enhance, or detract from the search engine optimization benefits that are inherent in a domain name. For example, makemoneyonline versus make-money-online. I personally value the non-hyphenated version much more than hyphenated, and have noticed a better success rate with SEO rankings.

It's important to note that when choosing your domain name should always try and find something memorable, that people will have an easy time to remember, spell, and even pronounce. Should you ever find yourself doing any type of audio announcements, as in radio, then being able to pronounce it without confusing the audience is important, especially when you consider the added cost involved if you have to spell it out over the air.

Make sure you avoid trademark names, even just having them somewhere in the domain name. For example rather than have Facebook marketing dot com, have something like FB marketing, otherwise you're sure to be receive a cease and desist letter in the mail at some point in the future from a team of lawyers. It would be a shame to invest time, resources and money into building up your website only to have to take it down once you've started to see some success with it.

When doing domain name searches, it can seem like all the good ones are taken, practically every combination of words that you can think of have either been registered for someone else's use, or are being sat on in the hopes that they will be able to sell it for profit in the future, this is called domain squatting.

If you're unable to come up with something you're happy with, another possibility is purchasing one that has already been registered by an individual who has decided not to use it, or in many cases there are companies who register thousands upon thousands of domains as they are dropped out of the registry each and every day, they then offer these websites up for sale at an inflated price. However if you have the resources and don't mind forking out a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand dollars you can find yourself with a pretty nice domain name, without too much trouble.

If you think there is a chance your website will become quite successful, or quite popular, it could very well be worth investing a few dollars extra in securing the.net version as well as the dot org version to ensure that nobody tries to either capitalize on your success, or even worse tarnish your reputation.

When you consider the fact that you're most likely going to have this website for many, many years, you begin to realize just how important it is to invest the time into ensuring that you've made the absolute best possible choice.

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Article Tags: blog, domain name, registering, website



Related Forum Posts
Making money with Obama.me - I posted here last week about the .me domain suffix and how you can makle money with it. A member of another forum i belong to register the domain and he is about to resell it. As of wiring this the domain is worth $921. If obama become the president of America, the domain might worth thousands of dollars.
Re: Domain name sugestion - Dear Aneilly I did some training on domain names. SBI recommends a domain name that scores well on search engines. Using key words that identify your product or service in your domain name will drive free traffic to your site.
Re: How Much Is Your Website Worth? - Good question! I don't know if anybody has traded sites at values suggested by dnscoop. According to the blurb on dnscoop, the value is based on several factors, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web. They also have a forum where domain names are traded, but I couldn't work out whether people were basing their prices on dnscoop valuations...
Re: When choosing a domain. - I think choosing depend on your keywords not your company or business name so if your are working on car sales don't put your company choose domain like cardealer.com
Domain name sugestion - Hi. I 'm asking for some ideas. I need a name for a new domain. The domain will be used to provide technical support to specific software users.


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