Advice about choosing a domain name

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Choosing domain names, or web addresses is a major thing when you want to do business online. Whilst a great, or even halfway decent domain name may not guarantee success, it can most definitely have an impact on just about all aspects of your online business. So how can a business choose a great domain name?  Here are our top tips.

When choosing a domain name, your best bet is to get one that is short, concise and easy to remember, as this will minimise confusion. If you are going for a domain that could possibly cause a bit of confusion, then it’s generally it falls into one of these categories: words that sound similar, common misspellings, hyphenated or non-hyphenated variations.

Generally domain names with less than three syllables are best.  However, long domain names offer more flexibility in choosing a domain name, allowing you to be more descriptive about what your site is about or what it does.  this could be an advantage for SEO purposes.

Don’t choose domain names like stuff4free.com or free-stuff-online though, as it makes it hard for the domain to be passed on to others through word of mouth. People can’t actually "hear" whether it’s 4 or four, and they can’t "hear" the hyphens.

Just like complicated email addresses, joe_bloggs.com looks ok, but try telling someone to go there, joe underscore bloggs dot com is just hard to say.  you might have customers from another part of the world that might not speak English as well as you do, so choose a domain name that is easy to get right.  Short domain names are generally better than long, just for convenience sake.  I'm sure that you will have to enter your email address or domain name many times in the future so the shorter the better.

I’m not a fan of dots, dashes and numbers in a domain name, I think I prefer them as letters all in a row, like stuffforfree.com, freestuffonline.com and joebloggs.com (or whatever else the extension may be).

Try testing out names on family and friends, together you could come up with a really great name, one you wouldn’t have thought up on your own, and with a bit of luck it may not have been taken already.

Once you have your domain name you need to think about the top level domain eg .com, .co.uk or .net etc.  From experience I must say that if you can't get the .com it's better to choose another domain name.  Some people even go as far as to buy other domain names to prevent against copycats that might try to clone your business.  At the same time be aware of internet registration companies that try to sell you other top level domains by claiming that another company wants to buy them too.

All Mile High Media websites include a free .com domain name and our brand management experts can advise you on your choice.

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