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Web Hosting

How To Choose A Great Domain Name

by Tricia on November 4, 2008

What’s the one one thing that your online business requires to stand above the competition and become very successful?

A great domain name!

The domain name is what people type in when they want to get to your site - it’s the part that comes after the http:// or the www. It’s your online address. Having something they can remember without having to look it up each time or keeping it in their bookmarks, to be lost among the all the other addresses, is the best thing you can do to get repeat visitors and word-of-mouth free traffic.

It’s said that all the good domain names have been taken, but that’s about as certainly not the case. Here are some simple guidelines that will make your domain name — and your business — a memorable and popular web destination.

1. Choose a Dot-Com

The primary rule is, go for the dot-com domain extension, which is typed as .com. This is the Main Street of the virtual real estate world, and the one that most people will type in regardless of what your domain extension actually is. While .org and .net were popular for a while, and then .us, .biz,.info and .name took the stage, people always come back to .com — irrespective of how many different country code top level domains are launched into the mainstream, like .cc, .ws, .to, .cn and others.

2. Choose something memorable

You want your business name to be your domain name too, if possible. So if your flower shop is called Felicty’s Flowers, you want to get felicitysflowers.com, assuming it’s available. If that domain name isn’t available, try adding a dash, like felicitys-flowers.com or a secondary descriptive word like felicitysflowersonline.com or prettyfelicitysflowers.com. If you’re creative, you’ll have no problem coming up with something that works with your business name and is memorable for your customer.

Bear in mind that if you use a dash in your domain name, which some Search Engine Optimization experts say attracts more free traffic to your site, you need to say the dashes if you use your domain name in an audio product or commercial; so it would be “felicitys dash flowers dot com”.

Most people who enter your domain name into their browser later will not type the dashes.

3. Get another variation

If you’re fortunate enough to grab a great domain name without the dashes, then you might want to get the same name with dashes between the words as well. You can put both of them up on your server as mirror sites to get the benefits of SEO as well as the ease of typing without the dashes.

You may also want to consider getting the .net or .org variation or even another extension or two to use as sister sites for your main dot com site… maybe you could put your forum on the .net, or use your .com for your main product and .net for your business background information site.

Even if you’re searching for a domain name that you don’t really think will be available, using your creativity and trying a variety of word combinations should allow you to lock down an unforgettable domain name that will attract people to your website.

It can be quite time consuming checking domain name availability as you find each successive name you come up with has already been registered.

So why not buy an expired domain name? Don’t know where to look? You’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of domain names for sale at this site: http://www.crazydomainsales.com

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