Your site name is the shortcut that your traffic will use to find your website. Every web site has a numerical address that identifies it uniquely, but this address is, for most people, difficult to remember. Instead, we use a combination of letters and numbers to give our websites addresses that we can simply remember and talk around.
And choosing these names can be both tremendously difficult to do and crucial to get right! Here are some crucial pointers.
1 - Look For A Good Web site Name
Your web site name not only acts as a shortcut to the web site, it also give a first impressions. freds-new-web site may be available to register, but if you are wanting to give the impression of a high class, quality law firm, does the name match?
You might want to base the name about your trading name or you might want to base it around key search terms you are expecting your visitors to be searching for. But consider shrinking the name if it is very long, Haskayne Pet And Country Equestrian Centre might be a good name for one of my customers' shop, but as a site name, it is too much to type in.
2 - Check For Other Sites Using The Name
At first it may seem useful to register a misspelling of a competitor's name in the hope of getting traffic from their web site, but the authorities who maintain domain names do not permit this on the whole. If your competitor finds out, they could demand that the name is transferred over to them.
And it is not just competitors. Finding and registering an unused extension of a Google address might also seem clever, but once again when they find out, they could reclaim the website name.
3 - Register The Website In Your Name
If you are registering the web site name yourself this should happen anyway, but if you have a website designer or another company registering the name for you, make sure that it is registered to your name and address. Loads of will try to register the website in their own name, but this can cause you loads of problems later on, let's say if you try to move to a different designer. Do not pay their charges in full until they have changed it to registered to you.
4 - Avoid Hyphens
Where prospective, avoid hyphens in the name as most people will ignore them and type the name without them! This could mean visitors going to a different website instead of yours and a waste of your offline marketing efforts!
5 - Think Of The Extensions
Should you by the .com generic name, or the .org? Or maybe a local name for example .co.uk?
It is a big decision, but the answer can sometimes to be buy both. My rule of thumb is that if you are aiming at traffic just in your own country, by a local name. If you want to target the website internationally, then you need to look at the .com extensions.
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