The science of choosing a domain name

Now that you’ve decided on a blog or a website, you need to choose a domain. Instantly you might think the name of your business would be the logical domain. That isn’t always the case, however.

Ask yourself, “When people search for what I am selling will they be searching for my business name or for the product or service I offer?”

If they will be searching for a product or service you offer, your site would do better in search engines if the domain has something to do with the keywords people will be using.

On the other hand, I chose my domain www.BeachBettyPR.com for branding purposes. Also, because my long range plans for the site dictated a name based on my services alone, like “affordable press releases”  or “affordable public relations” would be to limiting. Also because I don’t offer all the traditional public relations services, only a select few, and the services I do offer are varied. So to me it made more sense to use the name of my business.

But for the new online store I’ll be launching soon offering surf stuff, I chose the domain www.bestsurfstuff.com rather than what we are calling the business.

And that’s a good point. Remember you don’t have to have your domain name and your business name be the same as long as the domain name isn’t misleading. For instance if I chose some hot topic of the minute as my domain because I know people will be searching for it and it has nothing to do with surf stuff and they come to my site and that’s not what they were looking for, then there are going to be some people angry and they won’t buy anything. So what’s the point?

I know good domain names are getting harder and harder to come by these days but you want to try to get a .com domain name. It is just want people are used to and .net and the others are not what instantly comes to mind for people, or what stays in their mind.

Also, try to get something short if you can. Long names are harder to remember for people coming to you directly. And avoid hypens. That’s just another thing that trips people up.

Do you have any tips to add in selecting a domain name? How did you come about your domain name?