5 Tips On How to Pick a Name for Your Business Website
Picking a domain name for your website is always a responsible step. If it is a business website – the responsibility is times higher. This article outlines couple of tips to help you make the right decision.
Register a Domain Before Your Website Goes Live
If you are only starting your online business, you are not likely to launch your website off hand. It does take time to work out a strategy, to have the website developed, to find reliable hosting, etc. If a web page is an additional marketing or media source for your business, it will take even more time – time which may be enough for someone to “steal” your domain name. Therefore, it is always better to register a domain name in advance. Maybe you will be paying extra, but it is anyway better, than trying to find the desired name on a marketplace or end up with no domain at all.
Make Out a Neat Catchy Name and Pick a Matching Extension
If you want your domain to become a word of mouth and a Google ranking rock star, make sure the name you make out is relatively short and easy to remember and to spell. Abbreviations may work in some cases, but make sure that they are understandable for your visitors.
Talking about domain extensions or TLD’s (Top Level Domains) for business websites, we usually mean such popular ones, as .COM, .NET and .BIZ. Additionally, the Internet was recently shocked with the launch of another TLD, perfectly fitting to companies and corporations – a .CO, which is now becoming more and more popular. The choice of the extension is essential, since some names may not match some TLD’s in terms of spelling and pronunciation, while some may hit a bull’s-eye (e.g. a Women’s Business Center, which launched womenbiz.biz).
Another thing to bear in mind is local search ranking. If your business is operating in some specific geographic area it is recommended to get the corresponding ccTLD (county-code Top Level Domain) like .co.uk, .de, .com.mx and so forth.
Try to have some relevant keywords in domain name
If SEO is one of your key promotion strategies, then consider registering a domain name with some of your main keywords included. This will help with your SEO efforts and will you’re your site more relevant in the eyes of potential customers. Moreover, when the search query is included in the domain name, search engines automatically make them bold, which increases the chances of getting higher CTR from organic listings. If you deal with car rent, a carsforrent.com domain would hit the spot. On the other hand, you should be careful with making out a domain name from keywords solely – this may make it spam-like and hardly attract any clients, as it won’t be memorable and easy-to-spell.
Create Aliases
Just one domain is not always enough for a serious business project. It is advisable to also have an alias. Aliases may play different roles. For instance, you have a mybizpage.com domain as a main one and register a .CO domain in addition. You add this mybizpage.co as a parked domain, so now you have two domains displaying the same content.
If you a running a blog or a forum along with your main website, you may use an alias for it. First, it is more secure for the main account, than having it hosted in the main domain’s subfolder (mybizpage.com/myblog); at second, you receive another domain for cross-linking and SEO. That’s where abbreviations and shortenings may come in handy.
Don’t Let Typos Steal Your Traffic
There is no spell check for domains, so people may have your domain name misprinted. In this case they will get a “not found” error message… unless a misprinted domain is registered and redirected to the correct one. Namely, you need to figure out, which typos are most likely to be made and register domains with those misprinted names. Then you set a simple redirect to your website, which will make you sure that all your potential customers hit the right site – yours. If you take your business seriously, you should take care of this; otherwise your competitors may do this and then all the traffic will be redirected to their website.
Conclusion
We hope those little tips will bring you some big assistance when you face a question of website launch and domain registration. In case you have already had some thoughts about starting your own web project, it may be worthy spending a couple of minutes browsing through our pages and studying the plans we provide. Our shared hosting for small business and big projects come with a free domain, so you may start making up a name for your website with the tips above in mind.
Tags: domain registration, E-commerce, web site