Choosing your domain name can be a daunting task.
If you get it wrong you may spend a lot of your time wondering why people can’t find your site, send you email or buy your products.
A lot of businesses seem to think that they have to use their company name, regardless of how long or difficult to type that may be.
A couple of simple rules of thumb can help make it all that easier for you in the long run:
- Keep it as short as possible
- Keep it simple
- Avoid using hyphens
- Choose a meaningful word or phrase
The longer and more complex your domain name is the more likely people are going to write it down incorrectly or mistype it when sending you emails.
For example, your company name might be made up of several partners’ surnames, so you could end up with a name such as Alpha, Bravo and Charlie Ltd. If you were to convert that into a domain name directly you’d end up with over 17 characters!
Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to use an acronym?
If you sell a particular type of product or service then maybe you should try for a domain name that directly reflects what you do.
Alpha Widgets Ltd maybe legally correct on your headed paper, but widgets.ie is going to be easier to remember.
About the Author: Michele Neylon
4 Comments
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Offtopic (sorry), but could you make the feeds for your blog full-text, please?
Paul – I will do as soon as I can persuade MT that it’s the right thing to do 🙂
Ok. It’s been fixed 🙂
Hyphens are required sometimes. For example, if all potential names are already reserved or used.
I decided for hyphens for my primary web site when I did not know anything about SEO, AdSense, web site traffic, etc. It’s name is aqua-fish.net. People take it normally and my domain isn’t mistaken with aquafish.net at all. I think that it’s OK to use hyphens if there is a valid reason to do so. In addition… I didn’t want my domain name to be very long. Good reason to use a hyphen in my opinion.
Of course, long named domains with 2+ hyphens suck …