Choosing a domain name is a hectic task. There is a lot of confusion, and after registering a domain name for your website, many times you might have felt that you could have chosen a better domain name or you later found out an available domain name which sounds, feels better than your current domain name.
Many website owners also go through the pain of changing domain names which is destructive some times and can cause low traffic, lose of domain authority in search engines and all your marketing efforts on previous domain is null. I’ll give you some tips to choose a domain name which you will not regret registering later.
- Always choose a .com if you are planning to create a big blog or website. For a micro-niche site, you might choose a .net or .org if it is a strict keyword domain and you are specifically targeting that keyword for search engine traffic. Also .org is preferable over .net as it seems search engines love .org more than .net. If you are confused over which top level domain to use, always choose a .com.
- Decide whether you are good with social media or you want major traffic from search engines. If you will mainly use social media to promote your website, go for branding domain names. In this case always choose a .com. If you have higher aspiration and big budget so that you are able to target competitive keywords, go for domains with keywords. SEO will become increasingly difficult after 2010 and big players with lots of money can only rank for keywords which bring lots of search engine traffic. Get real, you can’t ever rank for ‘make money online’ or ‘web hosting’ or ‘blog tips’ and if you do get ranked for these terms after many years, you can’t hope to hold that rank for long because those big players will put lot of money into marketing and link building to pull you down. So, go for branding with a .com is your best bet.
- Try to register smallest possible domain name Again its best for branding purposes. Visitors will remember your website or blog easily and make sure it looks cool and sounds cool.
- Avoid choosing a domain name with hyphen and numbers. Hyphen and numbers are best to be avoided. Hyphens are sometimes used for micro-niche sites targeting specific keywords. But if you are not already in developing micro-niche sites, don’t use hyphens.
- My last advice is there is no sure shot rule for choosing domain names and you will need some experience before you start choosing the right domain names which are good for business websites and which have sales value. Before you gain that experience, my advice is to stick to branding with a .com so that you don’t regret having it later and you are not tempted to change it later making all your efforts done for marketing and SEO futile.
Is the tips helps you out? Share your ideas on how to choose a domain name?
This is a guest post by Amit Sharma who blogs at Money Blog Tips.
Some good point there,but its not true that Search engines loves .org over .net. there are more than 200 factors which google consider for SERP.
Thanks for your comment Shankar. Google considers so many factors for ranking so its hard to tell anything for sure . And everything we learn about SEO is just guesses. So many factors to consider that one factor probably won’t matter much.
Nice Post…these tips are quite a lot effective..many times it happens we think about our purchased domain twice….so it’s better to decide sensibly before purchase by taking all factors in account….:)
Great piece of tips 🙂 Worth reading it
Choosing a long domain name is probably the worst practice. Also, choosing names which are too unique makes the name a bit confusing & hard to remember.
thanks for this info , will be useful for beginers
Very Good Post Amit. Thanks for sharing
It is always the best to choose short and memorable domain name. Forget about the keywords. Google has recently improve algorithm so having keywords in the domain name now has less influence on ranking than it had in the past.