10 Tips Before Registering a Domain Name

Your domain name is your online address, your website’s brand name and the first thing that a lot of your visitors will know about you. It’s the beginning of something awesome. But there are a lot of examples of domains going wrong. Whether it’s Pen Island making penisland.net or Speed of Art making speedofart.com, you don’t want to be the next one to register one of these ridiculous domains.

Luckily, here are 10 tips to make registering the right domain name easy.

1. Use your business

If your business is called Rick’s Body Shop and you’re in Australia, then ricksbodyshop.au is probably what you should look at. That’s pretty easy.

But what if you don’t have a physical business? What if your website is your business? Should you use relevant keywords – like pets.com – or try to create a brand – like amazon.com?

One of the best ways to make your website memorable and eye-catching, while still retaining the slight boost you get in search engines from having a keyword in your domain, is to create a brand that includes a keyword.

If you have a name that people can’t immediately link to your business, then it requires a lot more time spent establishing your brand. If your brand includes what you do, then it’s easy to understand from the first glance. That’s what makes brands like hotmail.com or careerfinder.com so effective.They do what they say, right in the name.

Including your business right in the domain name has gotten even easier with new domain extensions. Nothing says that you’re a plumber like a .plumbing domain or florist like a .florist, well you get the idea. These new extensions take a lot of the headache out of branding.

2. Be brief

Make sure that people can type and remember your domain name. A big part of this is making it short. Longer things are just harder to remember and type.

Being short is another advantage of the new domain extensions. Take Alphabet, Google’s parent company, who registered abc.xyz. These short domains are often not available in the more established domain name spaces.

3. Make it uniquely yours

You don’t want your website to be mistaken for one that’s already been established. This just makes you look like an imitator. Even worse, it can lead to legal challenges, in rare cases. Make sure you do your research and register a domain that’s all yours.

4. Localise

If you’ve got a local business, you will want to include the city in your domain name. You can do this by making it sydneykungfu.com.au. But if you take advantage of new domain extensions it can go on the other side of the dot – like kungfu.sydney.

5. Protect your brand

If you have a new domain extension, then you’re going to have an easier time creating a memorable brand.

But, on the other hand, when people type your address into their browsers, some of them are going to forget that anything other than .com (or .com.au or whatever local extension is used most often) exists.

For this reason, you’re going to need to register multiple domains – perhaps 2 or 3 – and create a 301 redirect to your main website. It’s a small extra expense, but it’s usually worth it when you consider the type-in-traffic you’ll get.

Another way to protect your brand from unwanted attention is to register the .porn, .adult and .xxx extensions for your domain. You don’t want anyone connecting your business to the adult industry without your knowledge.

6. Don’t use a bunch of numb3rs-and-hyphens

It might be tempting, but these are hard to remember, hard to pass around via word of mouth (that’s numbers with a three, like the number, not the word, instead of the e and hyphens between every word, the symbols not the word – you know what, forget it) and correlates badly with good Google results.

7. Reserve the name early

When it comes to creating a website, the domain is rarely the biggest expense. Registering domains is affordable and involves no obligation to do anything else with them.

If you have a great idea for a website but don’t know if you want to create a website just yet, you can register the domain and sit on it until you’re ready to make a website.

8. Make it professional

This bears saying, although it seems obvious. Make sure that your domain name is spelled correctly and doesn’t include any slang. Even ideas that seem good can be ridiculous when written down. That’s how IHA Las Vegas ended up with the domain ihavegas.com. Make sure it doesn’t spell anything that you don’t want to say.

9. Backorder inactive domains

If you know that there’s a perfect domain for your website but it’s currently registered, don’t lose hope. Do a WhoIs lookup and see when it expires. If it’s soon and there’s isn’t a regularly-updated website hosted at the domain, then it’s a perfect candidate for backordering.

10. Take your time

Brainstorming a lot of good ideas is always worth it. Take the time to think about it now and you may not have to face the time, expense and trouble of migrating your website to a new domain later.

Conclusion

If you follow these 10 tips on how to choose a domain, you’re going to have an easy time being successful online. A domain name is the beginning of something incredible. Make sure you start out right.

SOURCE: Crazy Domains