Choosing a Domain Name – 5 Things to Consider

Choosing a domain name for your small business website needs careful consideration; below you’ll find five key points you should bear in mind.

• Should your domain name include relevant keywords?

There’s a lot of debate about whether you should choose a brand domain name or a keyword-rich one. For example if you own a couple of off licences in Telford called Vino Tonight, should you choose vinotonight as your domain name or offlicencestelford? (assuming both are available).

My personal opinion is it’s better for small businesses to opt for keyword-rich domains if possible rather than brand names. It’s useful in terms of incoming links to have a keyword-rich domain name. Using the offlicencestelford example above, every link generated to your site using your web address will automatically include the main search phrase you want to be found for.

The page titles carry a lot of weight in terms of SEO so even if you don’t know how to optimise yours, just by having your offlicencestelford domain name as the page title (also known as meta title) you will rank better than if you had the same site on the domain vinotonight.

• Should you buy more than one version of your domain name?

There are many domain name possibilities and extensions out there and this can lead to confusion.

The first dilemma is should you register the .co.uk, .com, .biz domain extensions for your chosen name or just .co.uk? For smaller businesses with a budget you’re best of just choosing the main extensions such as .co.uk and .com otherwise you’ll have a very big bill for registering all the different versions available.

The second point to consider is variations of the domain name itself. For example should you register offlicences-telford, offlicence-telford, off-licence-telford as well as offlicensestelford? Again, as a small business this will cost you more than it’s worth doing.

• Is your domain name easy to spell?

Making sure your domain name is easy to spell should be another of your main considerations. Having a difficult word in your domain may act as a barrier to some people visiting your site.

In the example I’ve already used some people may spell “licence” as “license” so in this case it may be worthwhile registering this alternative as a domain that and point it to your main domain.

However it’s best to avoid names and words that could feasibly have a number of different spellings as people may only try once and give up.

• Should you register your domain in your own name?

When you’re looking to get a website for your small business it’s wise to make sure you register the domain for it yourself. Unfortunately some people have fallen foul of unscrupulous designers who have registered a domain name for them and charged excessive amounts to renew it or transfer it into the customer’s name.

• Don’t delay

Once you’ve decided on your domain name and run it past your friends, family and ideally some people in your target market, register it straight away.

You just never know who else may be looking for a domain like yours and if you don’t register your domain as soon as possible, it may not be available when you do go to buy it.

While your choice of domain name won’t make or break your online business, it’s worth taking the time to give it some thought to make sure you get one you’ll be happy with.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.