How do you come up with great domain name ideas when you're building a web site?
First
of all you need to know what a good domain name should do.
How
about:
Taking the time to
choose the best domain name is an investment in your web site.
It's a good idea to use your site concept in the domain name. It tells the search engines and potential visitors what your site is about. What tells you more: car-pictures-and-posters.com or smithbros.com ?
You'll
come up with much better domain name ideas if you don't choose the name
up front. Develop your site concept, research keywords for your site
and do some planning before you choose the name. You'll often find that
as you work through the process the concept of your site will change.
You
may find that your original idea doesn't monetize well so you need to
change it a bit, or that the keywords you were thinking of
just
aren't getting many searches. Your idea may have been too broad or too
narrow so you have to modify the original concept.
If you choose
your domain name without doing any keyword
research you can easily choose
a phrase that hardly anybody searches on. With research you may find
that ninety
percent of people search on “house plumbing”, and ten percent on
“domestic plumbing”.
In that case
blacktown-house-plumbing.com would be a lot better choice
than blacktown-domestic-plumbing.com.
Slant
your domain name ideas to suit your target market. If you're going for
a young trendy market the name can be more casual. If you're after a
mature, conservative market the name should be more mature and
conservative.
cool-investing-ideas.com probably
wouldn't give a chartered accountant target market a lot of confidence.
Don't be satisfied with coming up with one idea for your domain name. Write down ten domain name ideas, so that you have a much better chance of coming up with the best name.
Dashes
can make a long domain name
easier to read. Dashes have been controversial
though. I've read that you should use them because it's better for the
search engines, and I've read that you should never use them because
the search engines don't like them.
Success leaves
clues
though. Site Build It! sites as a group
are probably the most
successful sites on the internet in terms of targeted traffic, and many
of them
use dashes in the domain name. The Site Build It! site
building guide
suggests using dashes in domain names with three words or more. It
certainly makes them easier to understand and remember, and the search
engines don't seem to mind. What's easier to understand:
buildingawebsite.com or building-a-web-site.com?
Domain
names with just two words are normally fine without dashes, so you can
go either way there.
Sometimes you do want to use your business name as a
domain name because it is well known in your town. For the best of both
worlds you can use your
site concept in your domain name for the website, and have your
business name as a second domain name that redirects to your website.
For
example, your website could be named blacktown-house-plumbing.com, and
you could have a second domain name j-smith-and-son.com that sends
visitors to blacktown-house-plumbing.com when it is clicked on.
It can be devastating to build up a website and be getting good traffic, and then get a letter from a lawyer saying you can't use the domain name because it is a registered trade mark.
Do a search on checking business names and trademarks to find what you need to know in your country.
After all the effort you've put into your
domain name ideas, why would you want to change?
You'll
find that there are so many websites on the net it's likely that your
perfect
domain name has already been registered. You can check for availability
with a domain registrar. If your perfect name has been taken you'll
have to try a
variation. In fact if you're in a popular niche you'll probably have to
try a few variations.
As well as trying variations
on the
wording, you can try the domain name with or without dashes, or you
could see if the .net extension is available. I personally wouldn't use
.biz or .info extensions though. They don't look as professional as
.com or .net.
Once you've come up with a great domain name its time to register it. Click on the link to learn how to register a new domain name.
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