What is a domain name?

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Before you even start to build your site you need to come up with a domain name. The domain name or your website address is one of the key components in popularizing your company. Same in traditional platforms, when running a business online you have to create your brand name and build recall about your brand. Your domain name is very crucial in creating awareness about your brand among your potential customers. When you have the right domain name of website address that suits well with the type of product you’re promoting that helps you to get known and become frequently visited on the internet. The domain name reflects your product or service you offer in your site.

What is the importance of having the right domain name?

  •  Your domain name is essential in your marketing.
  •  It is the value of the brand or your business
  •  It is the trademark for your business through which you will be remembered by your customers
  •  It is an asset that can be sold in the market
  •  It serve as your landing page
  •  It is your corporate site
  •  It can enhance the success of your company

Here are the tips when choosing domain name for your website:

  •  Make sure that your domain name ends with .com or you may want to end it with your country’s extension such as .au, .co.uk, .ph, etc. Or you can also use .net or .org. These are the top-level domains which will help you increase your ranking on search results. These extensions are the best extensions which you can use. The importance of choosing the right extension is that this lays the foundation for your web presence.
  •  Keep your domain name short. Avoid making a name that is longer than 3 to 4 words. Having a long domain name would give your potential customers a hard time finding your website because they have to type long website address. That would be a major turn-off. Remember that you will not only promoting your business online but also offline. When you want to produce calling cards you will have to put your domain name, so the shorter the name the easier to remember.
  •  Never create a hyphenated domain. Hyphenated domain does not seem authoritative domain names. The disadvantage is that in terms of visibility of your website hyphenated domain names have low grade in search optimization.
  •  When you can’t resist putting a hyphen, bear in mind to put only 1-2 hyphens.
  •  Bear in mind that choosing a domain name has legal implications. If you are a dealer of a company avoid incorporating the company’s name in your web site address. You may get sued for using their name without permission since it is not allowed by law. You can have the company’s name incorporated in your domain name if you have the permission of the company.
  •  Build your visibility by making multiple website using domain name that has a keyword. Use that keyword in your sites so that you will have more chance to appear on search results and be able to be visited more frequently.

A keyword-laiden domain name is advantageous than having no keywords. This is not to say that brandable names which have no keyword will not be successful. In fact there are many brandable names that became successful even if their names does not say so much about the product or service they offer such as facebook.com., twitter.com, yahoo.com and many others. However, keyword-laiden domain names will help your potential customers to link to your sites. For example if an online user looks for a restaurant over the net when he types restaurant the search engine will look for websites that has restaurant in its name so when you are a restaurant owner and your website address has restaurant in it then the customer may be able to get into your site.
It is up to you whether you want to choose a keyword-laiden name or a brandable name. For some they find it disadvantageous to have website address with a keyword since most of the people are resorting to this strategy. The disadvantage is that when customers look for your product and there are already many sites using the same keyword that reflects the product or service, customers will have difficult time to remember all those website addresses that have the same keywords which makes it less likely for you to get the attention of the customers.
While on the other hand, brandable names are unique which makes it easy to remember. So when people look for your product they can easily locate your site because you have a unique domain name.
Assigning domain name is part of building your brand. In fact, in digital market, it is the very foundation of your identity.