How to Choose a Domain Name

Short, Simple, Memorable

This can be kind of hard, since there are so many domains that are already taken, so it takes some creativity. You want your domain to be short and simple so it’s easy to remember. Take the example of some new Web 2.0 style domains del.icio.us, flickr.com, and ma.gnolia.com. If your trade name is already taken, maybe add an easy to remember word to the beginning or end of your domain to keep it simple. For example, 37 Signals product named Backpack, has the domain backpackit.com, and their Basecamp product is basecamphq.com. They cleverly added some minor words to the domain to keep it simple, and easy to remember.

Top Level Domain

Obviously, .com is the most common top level domain and de facto standard for web sites, and we recommend doing your best to register a .com domain. However, if your business is regional in nature, and can only serve your home country, then you may want to go with a .ca, .co.uk, or other country-specific top level domain.

WWW and Non-www

Ensure that your domain works properly with www in front of the domain as well as without www in front of the domain. This is pretty standard, however, it is still missed often when new sites are setup. For example, www.netshiftmedia.com and netshiftmedia.com.

Register Your Business Name

When registering your domains, make sure that you register your full business name. Even if your name is quite long, you want to register the entire domain because often users will simply type your company name into their address bar and then add a .com to the end if they don’t know your web site address. This can be a great complement to your primary domain if it isn’t already what you use for a primary domain. For example, if your business name is Diversity Search Corp. you will want to register diversity.com or some other variation of that word, however, you will also want to register diversitysearch.com and diversitysearchcorp.com, just for the fact that some users may just type the address in on their own and add the .com to the end. Net Shift Media currently owns netshift.ca, netshiftmedia.com and netshiftmediainc.com.

Mosty likely your business name will not be registered, if it is, then you may have legal grounds to acquire the domain, (but we don’t provide legal advice on this web site), it will also help people find your web site in search engines when they type your company name directly into the search box.

Numbers, Slang, and Homonyms

Try and keep your domain free of any numbers (written out, or digits), slang or homonyms. Homonyms are any words that sound the same but are spelled differently. This can cause a lot of confusion when visitors hear your domain either on the phone, radio, or in person. For example, our previous domain name was deepsix.ca, and 90% of the time we would have to tell someone specifically that the domain is “deepsix.ca (that’s S-I-X, not the number)” and then spell out the domain. Stay away from domains like socks4u.com or thirtythreeinteractive.com as you’ll always be spelling your domain out to customers. This rule applies for homonyms as well, since users won’t know which word you mean between, there and their, dear and deer, aerie and airy, affect and effect, or any other two words that sound the same.

Slang is equally important to stay away from in a domain name. If someone has never heard of the slang term that is in your domain, it makes it highly more likely that they won’t be able to remember it when they try access your site in the future.

One of the most important attributes of a good domain is being able to speak the domain and have little or no confusion about how it is spelled, for example, netshiftmedia.com will not create any confusion, whereas deepsix.ca, socks4u.com and windeffect.com can create confusion for the user.

Accronyms and Abbreviations

It used to be very popular to register your business name as an accronym, for example, nsmi.com (
Net
Shift
Media
Inc.), just because the domain was so small and easy to type, however this is not recommended anymore unless people specifically refer to your business as the accronym, for example General Electric is commonly referred to as GE, and the Cable News Network is commonly referred to as CNN, they have their respective accronyms (ge.com and cnn.com) registered.

Keywords

It is debated about whether having keywords in your domain will actually help your web site rank better in search engines. It was definitely the case in the past, however if it does still help, it is not as much as it would have in the past. However, it will not hurt your rankings, and can help develop your business brand around those specific terms, for example, carpetcleaners.com will definitely tell someone that the domain is for a carpet cleaning company. Don’t go overboard with this however, because, like I said, it doesn’t help like it used to.

Hyphens

If you have to use hyphens in your domain names, stick to 1 or 2 MAX! When keywords in domain names had a huge impact on rankings, search engine spammers would register outrageously long domain names with hyphens because the keywords would be in the domain, hoping to get better rankings with them. Stay away from emergency-payday-loans-in-canada.com or free-cellular-phone-ringtones.com. Domains like that may be flagged by search engines as a possible web spammers web site.

Multiple Domain Names

One final note to keep in mind with regards to having multiple domain names registered, and this has to do with search engines mostly, is that you want to choose 1 domain as your primary domain and then have all of your other domains redirect to your primary domain (unless you plan to have different content on each domain). This is a technical, web server, issue, and the redirects must be setup as “permanent 301″ redirects to tell the search engines that the domain has been permanently moved to the new location. This has to do mainly with search engines as it will transfer any links from all your domains to one destination domain, equally so it will ensure that search engines do not index each of your domains individually. If the search engines find the exact same content on multiple web sites they may penalize you, unless you have these redirects in place. To check whether your domains have been redirected properly, type in your alternate domains, and the actual domain in the address bar should actually change to the redirected domain, this doesn’t always ensure that it is setup properly, but 90% of the time it means it is setup properly. There are also web server redirection tools online you can use to check your domains.

Hopefully you’ve learned something from this article, and it will help when it is time to decide upon and register your domain.