Step-by-step Guide on How to Choose the search engines Friendly Domain Name

Before you attempt choosing an address for your site, it is worthy to note that choosing the search engines friendly names gives you a good impetus to be successful online. Search engines love key phrase rich domain, as this is recognized as as having a degree associated with relevancy. Your WebPages will rank remarkably well whenever you focus on choosing a domain that targets keywords for the core business. Making a friendly website address choice can help you in attracting targeted audience aimed at your website, thereby increasing your conversation rate resulting in more sales for your web business.
Consider the following simple steps that you could follow to have a good friendly domain for your web business:


1. Your Website Name Ought to be the Same As Your Domain

Naming your site after your domain may sound obvious with a people, but majority of sites aren't named after their domain titles.

I cannot emphasise enough how important it's to name your site after your website name, for the simple reason that after your audience think of your site, they'll think of it through name. If your website name can also be your URL, they'll automatically know what in order to type into the browser to get at your website. For example, when people think of IBM they do not have to wonder what URL to type into their browser to get at IBM site. In this instance, the name of the site can also be the URL.

Let's assume your company or website is called "HP", but unfortunately another person has registered the domain. Due to this, you have a various domain called, "yourbusiness.com". What happens when your customers, recalling that HP has a product they want to buy, and obviously type hp's website. They'll end up at your competitor's website. This situation will mean lost sale for you and a win for your competitor.

With the fast changing pace from the world of the Internet, exactly where consumers, academics and researchers automatically use the Web for information, it pays to possess a domain name that reflects your website or business. It is unrealistic to anticipate your potential customers to memorise an unrelated URL simply because you think they should? Make it easier to allow them to find you and do business along with you repeatedly, thereby leading to complete brand loyalty.

What if you can't get the address of your decision? How committed are you for your brand name and this specific name? If you already come with an existing brand name that you are known with, you'll probably not need to throw away that name simply because you couldn't get the site. It takes a lot of your time and money to build and begin a brand. Therefore, you might simply want to try and buy over the domain name in the current owner. How do you discover who owns this domain? You will have to search the global "whois" information database for that domain, and contact that person listed to determine if they're willing to sell that for you. You can search the "whois" database to find the details.. The current owner may very well want to sell this name for you at a much higher price that you simply you'll normally pay when purchasing a new domain. The first step is to determine if the current owner is able to sell.

You may prefer the cheaper option if you're just starting out, try to acquire a domain first, and then name your site or business afterwards. So if you have acquired the name "vintagecars.com", then your website and business might be named "Vintage Cars" or "vintagecars.com". This is the obvious route to take if you want to keep your costs to a bare minimum.

2. Better Domain: Brand Specific or even Generic?

What I would recommend here's to purchase both. Every online project differs. You could build your website about the generic domain and redirect the brand to the generic domain. Carrying this out way, you could get the extra advantage of link building using a key phrase based name but also have the choice of including the branded website name in your advertising, radio, paper, magazine etc. Also the other benefit is also to be able to sell the website in the near future.

If you are a business organisation, you'd usually want to opt for the branded domain as you will be around for a long period. If your project is a joint venture partner site, I'll recommend you opt for the generic name, as usually before long you might get bored using the project and may to sell it and move ahead to something new. The best strategy here is to try whenever possible to stick with the top quality domain.

This reason, I personally feel a site that matches your brand name is essential. The very name that you utilize to advertise your product is the name that you'll want for your website, because that's the first thing that people will attempt in their browser when they would like to visit your website. It is also easier to allow them to remember, and whatever that is actually easily remembered, will be prone to be tried out than the obscure website name.

3. Extended Registration Period

The question here's, should you register or renew your domain name for a long time of time? And if therefore, for how long? If you need to stay ahead of your competitors, then you might consider for just how long your competitors have registered their own domains. If your competitors have usually registered or renewed their domains for a couple of years, you might consider registering your website name for 5 or 10 many years. The expiration date and age of the domain might help your search engine rank, because search engines use age to find out credibility and genuineness of the business in general. Newer domain names with shorter expiration date are occasionally classed as spam sites by search engines like google. Although in search engines terms this can be only a small victory, but it's a worthwhile effort.

It certainly makes good business sense to join up an address for at least 5 years and ten years maximum. You don't want to cope with the cumbersome process of yearly domain renewal. It's best to get the domain that you want to keep for some time and renew them on the 5 to 10 year strategy.

If your domain expires it gets released to the public domain, and there's a great chance that someone will register your domain soon after it expires. If, for what ever reason, you failed to restore your domain, someone monitoring a 'watch list' of expiring domains will attempt to capitalize on the success of your web business that you've built over the actual years. When this happens, all the traffic you have built through the years with this domain is dropped to someone, and many years of effort has gone down the deplete. By renewing your domain name for quite some time, your domain name won't expire for some time, and it won't be open to expired domain name buyers.

It's worth noting as well which, you can lose your position in the various search engines if you failed to re-register your domain over time. You may have to start the Seo process all over again, which is a painful and expensive process for you personally.

4. Domain Name Length: Lengthy or Short?

Domain names can so long as maximum of 67 characters. Don't opt for an obscure domain name such as abs.com when what you really mean is AutomatedBreakingSystems.com. Considering this point, there appears to some argument from different professional angle whether a long or short domain name is better

Whichever way you view it, shorter is better because people will keep in mind that easily, as opposed to an extended domain name that is difficult to consider and certainly prone to spelling mistakes when typed to the browser.

More arguments stack up towards shorter domain names because they're easier to remember, easier to type and much less susceptible to mistakes: for instance, "bt.com" is easier to remember and less prone to typos than "britishtelecommunication.com".

Some of the arguments towards shorter domain names are solely academic. It is increasingly difficult to obtain short meaningful domain names. If you manage to obtain a short domain name, the advice is to ensure it is a meaningful mixture of characters and not the imprecise version.

Long domain names that have your website keywords in them also come with an advantage in that they perform better in many search engines. The latter give preference to keywords which are also found in your domains. So, for example, if you've got a site on free PHP scripts having a domain name like freehypertextpreprocessorscripts.com, it might fare better in a search for "free PHP scripts" than a site, freescripts.com.

Therefore, which would you go with regard to? I'd personally go for the shorter name basically can get a meaningful 1, but I'm not disinclining in order to longer names. However, I could possibly avoid extremely long names verging upon 67 characters mark. Apart from the obvious problem that people is probably not able to remember such an extended name, it would also be a difficult task typing it and attempting to fit it as a title in your web page.

5. Hyphenated Domain NamesShould you receive a hyphenated domain name? Consider the following benefits and drawbacks:

Disadvantage: One notable fact is that it's not hard to forget the hyphens when typing a name inside a browser. Many users are accustomed to typing things like freehypertextpreprocessorscripts.com but not free-hypertext-preprocessor-scripts.com. They'll probably leave out the hyphens and end up at your competitor's website.
Drawback: When people recommend your site for their friends and business associates verbally, having hyphens inside your domain name leads to more potential errors than once the name does not contain hyphens whatsoever. For example, how do you think these potential customers will refer to your site if it's named "free-hypertext-preprocessor-scripts.com "?
Disadvantage: It's much more demanding and cumbersome to kind. That's it. * Advantage: Search engines like google can distinguish your keywords better and therefore return your site more prominently searching results for those keywords occurring uniquely inside your domain name.
Advantage: The more reason is how the non-hyphenated variant of the domain may no more be available. At least by doing this, you still get the website name you want.
Personally, I would rather avoid hyphenated names if I will, but I guess it really depends upon the domain name you want, and your project and company situation.

6. Use of Plurals Generally

If you can't get the domain name you need to register, the domain name registrar will suggest variants from the name you typed. For instance, if you wanted scripts.com, and it was already taken, it might suggest other variants like:

thescripts.com
* myscripts.com
* thescriptswebsites.com

The question here's, should you go with the actual suggested variants?

My personal opinion is that for the suggested variants of the website name, you must always remember to advertise your site(s) using the full variant of the title. Otherwise, people are likely to forget to affix the required "the" or "my".

7. That Extension?.COM,.ORG,.NET

One common question I usually encounter is from people who can't obtain the ".com" domain of their choice, but find the ".net", ".org" or other country-specific top level domains (TLDs) available (like.uk,.in,.fr,.ir etc). Should you go with the country specific top level domain?

The answer is not as clear cut as you may think. If your website or business attracts the local community, such like a curry delivery business or dancing club or so on, then it makes business sense to obtain a country-specific domain. You actually take advantage of having such a local domain since the people in your country realize that they're dealing with a nearby entity, which is what they need. It is also beneficial for highly targeted traffic when it comes to your search engine campaign work. After all, if they stay in (say) the uk, they're not likely to want to try and order curry from currydelivery.com, which may appear like a US or an international site. You'll have better luck calling it currydelivery.co.uk, i.e., with a UK domain, which immediately reassures people that they are dealing with a local business.

The predicament is let's say your site or business can take advantage of an international audience? There are many arguments through different schools of thought about this. I'll mention a few typical ones here.

The first way of thinking argues that it is better to possess a domain name of your choice "myidealdomain" even though it has a TLD associated with ". net", ". org" or another country specific extension, than to finish up choosing an obscure website name for the simple reason you cannot get your preferred choice of website name. Thus people would settle for domains like "myidealdomain. fr", "myidealdomain. net" or even myidealdomain. org. The contrary argument is when you get a country particular domain, people might think that the business only caters for which country.

Another school of believed argues that ". net" as well as ". org" extensions are actually quite acceptable types of domain names. For some, the actual ". org" extension actually describes the non-profit nature of the organisation. So, for example, the famous Cancer Research UK are available at www.cancerresearchuk. org.

Others for obvious reasons will be satisfied with nothing less than the ".com" extension. To further bolster their grounds, people on the site of this argument have cited specifically the browser algorithms used to locate a website when a user simply types a name like "ibm" into the browser. In fact, the browser searches for a domain name "ibm.com" before attempting "ibm.net", etc. As such, surfers who browse in this way will be delivered to your competitor's site if you do not also own the ".com" extension. Undeniably, even if people do not rely on their browser to complete their typing, many simply assume a ".com" extension when they type a domain name into the browser, so if your business is "IBM", they'll just assume your domain name is "ibm.com" rather than "may be ibm.net" or some other country specific extensions.

As possible see, there are actually good grounds for watching the arguments from these colleges of thoughts. My personal take to the above arguments is that should you get a domain name by having an extension other than ".com", make sure that you promote your business or website with the full domain name. For example, if your domain name is "petfoodstore.net", make sure that when you advertise your site or business; you should call it "petfoodstore.net" and not just "petfoodstore". Otherwise people will always assume a ".com" extension and will end up on your competitor's website.

Summary

Let me further emphasise the important thing points of this article -- get your domain name before you begin your site or business.

Don't make the mistake of trying to adapt your domain name for your business or website. Most of domains did not originally start out just like my business name, and I encountered a huge lack of traffic and business due to URL changes in future. Don't make exactly the same mistake.