You need to carefully consider how your domain name will affect your future search engine rankings and user friendliness. It is very important to know exactly what it is you want your website to do at this point.
Think of a website address as your home or business address. This is you location of planet Earth.
A website address is your location of the Internet. Infact a website address can offer more information than a internet location, this depends on the choice of information of the register when they do register the actual domain name.
Should your domain name be your company name?
Maybe not – unless your company has a name that is well-known, and instantly recognized.
Otherwise it is a good idea to go for a for a domain name that represents the type of product or industry you operate in. If your company is Russell & Jackson Ltd and you are accountants you then have the choice of
www.russell-and-jackson.co.uk, or
www.accountants-online.co.uk
This is vital to good search engine optimization because domain names with valid key words will ultimately rank higher on searches for those keywords.
How do you choose an effective name?
This is a name that is going to be connected with your business forever so it is important to make sure you are 100% happy with your choice. Take some time here to really think carefully about your choice. Your domain name, if correctly chosen, can alone be a powerful marketing tool!
The older a website, the more credibility it has within the search engines, so you cannot afford to come back later and change it!
A domain name should be relevant and easy to remember. It should reflect the keywords of the industry it operates in. This is important because it can impact on your search engine rankings at a later stage. A sensible and pertinent choice, like www.accountants-online.co.uk.is great, but beware of overdoing the keywords - www.accountants-for-quick-cheap-tax-returns.
There is a balance, in fact it has been suggested that Google prefer two-word domains, and we would certainly not recommend more than three. Apart from what you do, where you do it could be important too. If your business only covers a certain geographic area, it might be useful to include that in your name i.e: instead of www.best-plumber.co.uk, your domain could be www.best-plumber-dorset.co.uk. This would greatly improve your rankings within your local area but do think carefully about future expansion.
That wasn’t too tricky! But hang on, should those keywords be hyphenated or not? Google apparently does have the ability to distinguish between words without hyphens, but not all the other search engines can. It is therefore better to hyphenate if you can. It is particularly important where a string could become tricky to spell (i.e: www.yellow-widgets.co.uk is easier than www.yellowwidgets.co.uk). Also, be careful that you choose words that are easy and unambiguous to spell and understand – optimisation/optimization; program/programme - your searchers have a 50% chance of getting it wrong! Also, don’t be tempted by trendy spellings and mobile phone type abbreviations, they may not be recognized by many.
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