Choosing a good domain name

To choose a good domain name you must understand what it does for your business and your website. Domain name works on several fronts:

• It identifies your website on the Internet and makes it possible to access it
• It says something about the profile of your web-based business and business in general: possibly location, industry, core product, target market etc.
• It promotes your website via the search engines
• It is a part of your branding in general and as such will be displayed on your stationery (business cards etc.)

Ideal name would successfully satisfy all these needs. Regretfully, it almost never happens for two reasons: either any of the mentioned functions are in conflict or, if you managed to come up with a name to suit them all, it is not available for registration.

Lets take a look at some examples:

Say, we are Smith&Smith NZ Limited and we are in the business of selling “gadgets” on the New Zealand market. Registering a domain name “smith&smith.com” will solve our first problem – people get the chance to find our website by name. It also fits nicely into our existing branding structure.

Chosen name doesn't say much though about who we are and what we do. It can be slightly corrected by registering smith&smith.co.nz instead of .com (remember? our target market is NZ). But it still says little about our business.

Secondly, this name does nothing to help search engines to find us when potential client searches for “gadgets dealers NZ” in Google.

What can we do to help Google out? The only thing we can do really is to choose a descriptive domain name preferably with our core product in it: gadget.co.nz sounds like a good option, it’s short and easy to remember, it won’t look ugly on our business cards and it names our core product to help Google out.

We must be prepared that most of the generic terms are already taken and we may have to opt for gadgethouse.co.nz or something else.

And finally, having a name composed of several words we are facing another choice: name looking nicer or name performing better in the search results. And if our priority is search ranking, we may need to break our gadgethouse in two like so - “gadget-house.co.nz”. Most of the search engines treat dashed parts of a name as separate words and indexes them, which makes our chances to be found on the Internet just a little bit higher.

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Domain or Disk space?

There are two options available for you to publish you website:

• register your own unique domain name and host the site under this name OR
• upload your site to the folder allocated to you on the ISP server.

The first option costs more:
name registration fee, let's say $30 for one year; hosting fees, say 20 per month.

Second option cost less or nothing: No domain name required – your site will be published as a subdirectory of the ISP’s domain. Disk space cost in many cases will be included in your ISP plan as a free option.

So? Shouldn't we just save some money?

If we are talking about a business website or any website that aims to generate some traffic, the answer is - no.

Your own registered domain name works for you in a number of ways: it says something about your business; If chosen wisely, it increases your site ranking (which brings you more web traffic); last but not least - it looks good (would you prefer www.yellowpages.com/client37/index.htm OR www.gadget.com?)

One name is enough ... or is it?

Is one domain name enough? For all intents and purposes – yes. But ...

Suppose your company, distributing computer gadgets on the International market, is called iGadget. You go and register igadget.com as your domain name only to find two month later that igadget.net and igadget.co.nz (your home country extension) as well as i-gadget.com and bunch of other variations on the same name have been registered by your competitor and generate more traffic than you do.

Sometimes it is worth it to secure your name with various extensions even if you are not using all variants, just to prevent others from using essentially your business name.

Dashed or not?

While selecting a domain name you may face the choice of one-word string vs. dashed name:
www.gadgetworld.com OR
www.gadget-world.com.

Your choice would depend on your priorities: do you want a name to look nicer (which is often the case with one-word string) or do you want it to perform better in search engines?

Most of the search engines will index dashed name as separate words: gadget + world, which makes it a better choice if you aim at people browsing for “gadgets”.

Dot what (or shall I go International)?

Which extension to go with: .com or its national counterpart (.co.nz, for instance)?
Well, search engines treat both variants equally and you will not get ranking advantage over national extension if you choose .com name.

With this point out of the way, the only consideration left is your target market. If you target International audience, go with .com. If your focus is on local (National) market, .co.nz is better choice.

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How fast is your host?

One of the essential characteristics of your hosting company is speed.
How fast is your site loading? Well, you wouldn't know before you try, would you? So, before committing yourself to a hosting provider test their site several times over the period of several days to see if it loads fast enough (or at all). Better still, see if they have “existing clients” links on their website and do the same for these sites.

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Do you have to host locally?

Simple answer is – no. Shop around and you will find that hosting services overseas may be less expensive and have more features. Having local host does not always guarantee that loading speed of your site is higher. So why not to utilize the potential of the Internet?

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