Thinking about a New Business & A New Domain Name?
What’s best for Search Engines, Branding, Business Cards, and Signage?
Many have found that after coming up with the most perfect company name and going to their state to register as a partnership, LLC, or corporation – that they have trouble creating a domain name that matches their business name.
Well, you have a few different options or ways to look at the situation, here are some based on our digital marketing experience. And our own personal business experience.
1 – Alternative to .COM
The “.com” portion of a domain is referred to as the Top Level Domain or the Domain Extension. Almost everyone is comfortable with the “.com” but there are more and more extensions being added every day! Usually, the second most common ones are the COUNTRY codes (ex: .UK, .RU, and .EU) or .info, .net, and .org. But there are a host of other extensions and different domain registrars are offering more and more all the time.
We found that hover.com and hostica.com had hundreds of domain extensions!
2 – Something Different before the “.” Dot
The part of the domain name before the “.” is called the Mid Level Domain. This is where you can get really creative. But many find that many of the nice, short names have already been taken. And often taken by someone that might have purchased the domain and never actually used it. This can be frustrating. You might want to see if the domain is FOR SALE, but they are likely to be asking a lot of money for it.
So at this point, you might want to explore other names and hopefully, you’ll have done this before purchasing business cards, signage, or labels.
3 – Long Domains Add some dashes —
Sometimes people have long domain names that are difficult to read. But by adding some dashes or hyphens you not only make it easier for the human eye to quickly read the string of letters but you also alert the search engines that there are more than one word here.
There are two benefits of dashes;
- The dashes help the search engines understand that there are multiple words in the mid-level domain name. And therefore they will be more search engine friendly.
- Humans can easily see/recognize the words in your domain.
If you opt to have a long domain name, then consider opportunities to use capitals to make it easier on the human eye. For example my domain KateRaffertySEO.com is much easier to see than kateraffertyseo.com. The search engine computer don’t care about capitals and lower-case letters in domains so it’s really just for visual effect.
4 – Add Something Extra Like Your State’s Abbreviation
If you are a local business and don’t plan to ever expand outside of your state, then one easy solution is to add your state (ex: _____-NJ.com) to your domain name. This is also good to help both people and search engines to see immediately that the business is physically located in a particular state.
5 – Multiple Domain Names
As an SEO person, I’m not really a big proponent of multiple domain names but sometimes it’s useful to have a longer domain or a domain with hyphens as the primary website domain name – as it is the most meaningful for humans and the search engines and works with branding as well. However, you might want a shorter domain name for your business cards, signage, and even for your emails! You can purchase the shorter domain name and have it FORWARD or REDIRECT to your primary domain name – i.e. set it up with your domain registrant.