Your domain name should be easy to remember. Keep the name as short as possible, but do not use unconventional spellings or add hyphens just to secure a version of the name you want.
Your domain name should be simplistic. Do not pick words which may be difficult to spell or which have multiple spellings. Also, select words and phrases that are common and easy to pronounce, especially if you are aiming your business toward the general public.
Your domain name should be a .com address whenever possible. Avoid selecting the less common extensions which cost more to register and which will be largely unfamiliar to your clients.
Once you do select a domain name, you should consider registering other variations of the name. That way if someone uses the wrong extension or adds a hyphen, he or she still end up right where you want them.
What characters can you use in a domain name?
the letters: a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z, the numbers: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, the hyphen “-” and that’s all - no dashes or dots or other characters.
How long can a domain name be?
Originally a domain name could only be 26 characters long but in 2000 I believe it was they changed that to 67 characters including the extension. In general I would not suggest a name this long but can have some uses as a way for search engines to determine the value of the domain based on the key words used in the domain name.
If you are buying a business domain name there are two considerations.
First, can you get your actual company name as a web domain name? maybe so, maybe not. Can you use an identifiable and easy to remember acronym? I have aetherarts webworks for a company name but that is too long. I could have opted for aaww.com but aetherarts.com was just fine by me. Now, with a little more analysis it could be said that I would have been better off using the more common etherarts… it is a little shorter, easier to remember but I felt that, in alphabetical lists, an ‘A’ would be better since it would show up before ‘E’ plus I wanted to more clearly to refer to the Greek origin of the word rather than the computer reference as in ethernet.
Secondly you want to consider the brevity of the name, short is better than long, it is best of you can easily say the name without any explanation and that it is easy to spell and easy to remember. For instance dogtag.com is mush better that dog-tag.com or tagdog.com for two reasons. A dash makes the name longer without good reason and if you have to say the name out loud to anyone then you have to say “dog dash tag.com instead of just dogtag.com. In the case of tagdog.com it is not what people are going to remember, they will remember dogtag.com because that it the way it is commonly heard. If your customers will always only read the name then it is less of an issue unless you expect that they will try to remember it off the top of their head in which case no dash is the typical guess. Also for the same reason, because it is everyone’s first guess, get the .com version as the main website location because people will tend to assume your name is a .com.
Whatever your domain name is use that same name as the website name and even modify your company name to match the web name so if your company is Dog Tags International and you end up with DogTags.com the change the name of your company to DogTags.com if you want to really maintain a seamless transition from print to web.
Remember that you can have more than one domain name. It is a good idea to have all the possible variations of your name, then if people are trying to find your domain by guessing, you’ve provided them with reasonable possible choices. Whilst you can have many domains our advice is to use just one as your principle domain so that customers and users remember where you are.
Recent Comments