A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if your business name isn’t followed by a dot-com your customers may never find your business.
Does your choice of domain name for your website really matter?
I’ll say it does!
Your domain name is like your street address. How will customers find you if they don’t know where to look — or worse, if they go to what they think is your address only to find your company is not there? Here are ten tips to choosing a domain name for your business:
1. Make it a dot-com – Henry Ford is rumored to have said about his Model T Ford that you could have it in any color “so long as it’s black.” That same attitude pretty much sums up one naming philosophy: choose any domain name, so long as it’s a “.com” extension. In the United States, most people typing in a domain name will type “.com” by default. With over 70 million registered URLs, the “.com” extension is by far the most popular, with “.net”, “.org”, and ”.info” lagging far behind in popularity, according to the ICANN Wiki.
2. Short and easy to spell — Shorter is better. A short URL is easier to remember and less likely to be misspelled than a long one. For obvious reasons, avoid any domain name that by its nature is hard to spell or confusing.
3. Company names and brand names — Whenever possible, register your company name as your main URL. It’s what people usually try first when looking for your business website. You might also consider registering your product/service names as additional URLs. The reason? Some companies now create mini-sites specifically for products and services — think Jif.com or Tide.com. Or they point the product URL to a section of their main website that features that product.
See the rest of the list at INC.
