A domain name is the website address or url that people type in to get to your website. This blog post (our first blog post, yay!) will be talking about what to look for in a good domain name. A good domain name, in general, should be as short and descriptive as possible.
Where do you recommend I purchase domain names?
We have received the best services and deals on domain names from GoDaddy.com. Also, being the industry leader, they aren’t going anywhere! Go there and start typing in domain names using the guide below.
Should I pick a .com? .org? or a .us?
First off, when people think of a website they always think of “.com”. Therefore, we recommend 99.9999% of the time, that you get the .com. If your optimal domain name is taken, but the .net is available, then we recommend that you try to get a different name in which you can grab the .com. What will happen if you grab a domain name other than the .com is that you will end up promoting whoever owns the .com!
Let’s say another company in town came in and bought cdadev.net and started promoting it hardcore. We would actually be really happy about it because as they are telling people to go to cdadev.net, people end up defaulting to the .com when they get home and forget that it was a .net. For this same reason, we rarely recommend purchasing all of the possible extensions that you could for your domain name. If someone else does, they will end up promoting your site in the long run.
If you find a .com that you want, and it’s not being used by the owner, you can always ask to purchase the domain name from the domain owner.
What other elements are important in my domain name?
Like we mentioned at the beginning of this post, a domain name should be short and descriptive. If your company has a name, you should try to get it if you can. For instance, if your company name is “Mark’s Lawn Mowing”, it’s a great idea to purchase that domain name, markslawnmowing.com. If your domain name is the name that people are searching for in Google, you have a better chance of getting found! So, grabbing markslawnmowing.com is great, because that protects your brand and you have a great chance of getting found when people search for your actual business name. However, at the same time it is also a good idea to tie up the domain name that people will most likely use when searching in Google. In this case, if Mark’s Lawn Mowing is in Coeur d’Alene, most people will probably use the phrase, “Coeur d’Alene Lawn Mowing” or “CDA Lawn Mowing”. Since that is the case, its also not a bad idea to grab cdalawnmowing.com because having those keywords in your domain name will make your site all the more relevant to Google when people are searching for “CDA Lawn Mowing”.
I can’t get the domain name I want, but I can get the version with dashes in it.
This is almost as bad of an idea as getting a .net, .org, or other domain name extension like we mentioned above. If markslawnmowing.com was taken, it would be a horrible mistake to try and purchase marks-lawn-mowing.com or marks-lawnmowing.com because people will hardly ever remember that there is a dash in the name. If you told your customer to go home and check out marks-lawn-mowing.com, when they got home, they will have defaulted to markslawnmowing.com.
In conclusion…
I hope this has been helpful. Remember, keep it short, descriptive, memorable, no dashes and .com’s only. To see if your domain name is available, check out www.GoDaddy.com.
