Prodigy Productions, LLC

Learn software development, computer vision, and A.I. programming.

Home

Picking a Domain Name

On August 22, 2010, in Marketing, SEO, Web Design, Web Hosting, by LuCuS

First off, what is a domain name? A domain name is a title that identifies your website. Just as you have a first and last name, a domain name does too. The first name of a domain is the most important part. It is the piece that people will use to identify your website. It’s the piece that comes between the “www” and “.com” or “.net”. More on that in a minute. For now, the “last name” of a domain name identifies what type of website it is. Domain names ending in “.com” are the most common here in the U.S.A. “com” is short for “commercial”, but doesn’t always mean “business”. There are other types of domains such as “.net”, “.org”, “.edu”, and many others. But, for our needs, we need to focus on “.com” since the majority of our customers are more familiar with it. Domain names are components of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL – Wikipedia). A domain name can point to multiple IP addresses to provide server redundancy. However, we’re only going to be needing one IP address to point to; the IP address of our web host provider.

There are several things to consider when picking a domain name. One of the things to look for in a domain name is how easy is it to remember? Long domain names or domain names made up of several words are a lot harder to remember than a single word domain name or a domain name that only has a couple of words, but is pretty catchy. Shorter domain names are a lot easier to pass along via word-of-mouth and are a lot easier to fit on business cards and letterheads.

Another key to remember when picking a domain name is make sure your domain name is relevant to your website. Lots of times users will pick domain names because they are catchy or easy to remember, but have nothing to do with their website. Most search engines will score your website lower if the domain name isn’t relevant to your website. Those domain names make it obvious that you’re just trying to come up with a clever way to draw traffic without having to do any of the real leg work.

The next thing to keep in mind is that you should try to pick a domain name that has at least one keyword that best describes your website. Don’t go overboard with this and try to avoid ambiguity in keywords. But, as stated above, try to keep it relevant to your website. Lots of search engines like to combine the keywords in your web pages with the domain name that is attached to them.

Another good trick to picking a domain name is to buy an existing domain name or one that has recently expired. Purchasing pre-existing domain names comes with several benefits. One of those benefits is that if the previous owner has done a lot marketing and advertising for their website, it is possible that some of those mechanisms are still in place. If they are, you will most likely see some traffic immediately without having to spend any time or money of your own.

Before purchasing a domain name, do your homework on it. If the domain name that you’re looking at is for sale by someone else or was in existence, but has expired, it’s probably for a reason. No matter what the reason is, the previous website didn’t work out and you don’t want to be stuck trying to re-salvage it. Also, make sure that the domain name isn’t on any kind of banned lists. For example, a few years back I purchased a domain name that I thought I could market easily. I thought I could put together a nice looking website and place some ads on it with Google Adsense or Yahoo! Publisher Network. That was a nice thought anyways. After purchasing the domain name and putting a lot of time into the website to go with it, I applied for accounts with both Google and Yahoo! only to be rejected by both. WTF? It didn’t make any sense to me. I checked, rechecked, and checked again everything about the website and their TOS. It wasn’t until I actually corresponded with representatives from both sites that I found out that the domain name I had purchased was previously tied to a known phishing site that was also chalked full of viruses and spyware. Even though I had proof that I was the new owner and was in no way associated with any of the former owners, the damage had already been done and there was nothing I could do.

While doing homework on your possible future domain name, be sure to compare it to any competitors you will be up against. Try to find out how much traffic your competitors are getting on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. There are lots of tools out there and I would recommend starting with Alexa or PageStat. In fact, you can even use PageStat.com to see how much a website is worth by adding the domain name to the end of the PageStat domain. Example: http://pagestat.com/www.twitter.com will show you that Twitter.com is currently estimated to be worth $77,124,790. My upcoming Web Marketing Toolkit will also have this capability. So, be sure to grab a copy when it’s finally released.

The last tip I’d like to share for now is pick a domain name that you will love forever. The point of creating a website (as we see it) is to make money and to continue making money for years to come. Our goal is to become successful enough at making money on the web that it will become our full time job. Anyways, if you pick a domain name now that you can’t see yourself with in 10 years, you should probably reconsider now. Picking a domain name is like picking a new home. You should plan to be in it for the long run. Besides, you don’t want to spend a lot of time and money for building traffic to your website just to have someone else reap the rewards. Instead, you want to pick a domain name and stick with it. It’s much easier to add other domain names that point to your website than it is to outright drop your current domain name and start all over promoting a new one. That just wouldn’t be very beneficial to YOUR success.