Welcome to the first article of our Online Marketing series. Here we gonna talk about the first step in online marketing “Selecting a Domain Name”.  Creating a website and optimizing your website for search engines is lot easier if you are careful in selecting a domain name. This article will help you to “Appropriate domain name” for your business.

1. Decide your audience before domain name

Let us assume your target audience will be looking for food recipes in your website, then having words like ‘recipe’ or ‘cook’ or ‘cooking’ or ‘cooks’ or ‘taste’  in domain name is a good idea. If your website talks about even more specific category of cooking like ‘Baking’ or ‘Roasting’ or ‘Broyling’ or ‘grilling’ or ‘barbecue’ or ‘fry’ will be even better. Let us try with these combination and check the availability of Domains. Let us assume ‘John’ is your name and you are looking for a Domain name for a recipe website/Blog.

At the time of writing this article:

JOHNCOOKS.COM

JOHNRECIPE.COM

JOHNBAKES.COM

JOHNROASTS.COM

JOHNEYROAST.COM  (resembles Cricket player Jonty Rhodes) were available.

Just apply your mind; you will get a good Domain name.

2. Select a meaningful domain name

Do not try to fill up your domain name. Look-4-Chicken-recipes-online.com is a very bad idea.  At the time of writing this article, I searched Google for “worst domain name” and it gives 14,500,000 results.

 
Top 3 from that list.

Top 10 worst Domain Names
20 more unfortunate Domain names
worst-company-urls

 

3. Do not use Dashed (-) Domain Names

Few years before domain name itself was a significant ranking factor. Now a days search engines like Google do not read the words in your web address.  If some one already registered johncooks.com and active on the internet, john-cooks.com or john-cooking.com is a very bad idea to grab traffic of johncooks.com for a domain name. By doing this you are indirectly promoting johncooks.com rather than your own john-cooks.com. If your Business sense is not long term you need to avoid Dashed-Domain-Names.

4. Avoid numbers in your domain names if you can

If you really like to use numbers , then use it sensibly. For Example easy2shop.com or easy2cook.com is better than shopeasy892.com. Shopeasy247.com or shop247.com makes sense, if your website reflects your 24 / 7 Business.

A good examples of numbered domain names :  1and1.com

5. TLD (Top Level Domain)

A domain name “extension” is called a “top-level domain (TLD).” These are divided into three different categories: generic top-level domains (gTLD), country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and infrastructure top-level domains. .com .net are examples of gTLD. .co.uk, .us, .in, .co.in are examples for ccTLD.

 
Some regional search engines or indexes will only list sites which are registered in their country code. If your site caters to a specific country then buying a domain using the local country code is a good idea. Some search engines will still show your site in regional based search results if your site is hosted within that country or have your address and phone number in the page text, but many directories are extremely picky and will only list regional domains. As search progresses localization of results will become more common. Some of the major search engines already give sites a regional ranking boost based upon where the site is hosted and the domain extension.
 
It’s a common practice to have a .com and/OR .net version of your domain and forwarding them to your ccTLD domain. By doing this you will not loose any Search engine traffic targeted on your business.
 
Just think and apply these best practices. You will get your valuable domain name, which is an online identity of your Business. Guard your brand in choosing the domain name. All the best on your Domain name Hunt.
 

References

http://www.wikipedia.com
http://independentsources.com
http://www.webreference.com/
http://www.seobook.com/

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