Select Best Domain Name: Which would be the best Domain Name for my site? How can I select a good domain name for my blog? Can you help me choosing domain name for my first WordPress website?
Yes! These types of questions repeatedly asked by my site users. So, here are some most important advanced factors which may help you to decide which domain name is best for your site.
You should choose your website address i.e. domain name very carefully. To choose best domain name, first of all collect some terms and phrases or words depending on the fact that whether you want to build your site for marketing your own name, business or profession. Once you have a list of names, select one of them which describe your site the most. Let us discuss some important factors which helps you to choose most suitable domain for your website.
Searching Domain Name for Personal Blog or Business Website
It is obvious that if you want to marketing yourself, your name itself would be the best domain name for your site. For Example: yourname.com or yourname.me or using any other domain extension would fit for building your personal identity online.
However, if you want to marketing your profession or business, the name that describe your business/profession would be the best domain name for your website. For Example: If you want to build your site related to selling and purchasing of insurance policy, you might start your domain name with words like insurance, secure, life, policy and other word related or identical of insurance.
Accordingly, if your website is a business site, you might use your company name as the domain name or if your site is for a specific topic try to think of a domain name that is related to the topic of your web site.
Think your site like a new baby born today and you are naming your sweet baby. However, you may consider the following facts and suggestions to choose best domain name for your website:
Short Domain Name
Keep your domain name as short as possible. One catching word is more than enough to make your domain name best from the rest. There are lots of benefits of short domain name:
- Short Domain Name would be easy to type and remember. Users may type wrong URL address for your site if your domain name is lengthy and contains unusual words.
- Short Domain Name helps to keep short URL of your site webpages that would be SEO friendly too.
- Short Domain Name also fit to online or offline form where limited characters would be allowed for writing your website address.
- Short Domain Name would take small space on your site, if you decide to make it as your site title.
- You may design fantastic and attractive logo with your Short Domain Name if your site title and domain name would be same.
Thus, you may say that shorter is always better. However, it is almost impossible to get or register single word domain name due to its unavailability. In case, you are not able to keep your domain name as a single word you may combine two or three words to make your domain name. For Example: SuperWebTricks.com
I strongly recommend that 5-10 characters long domain name would be the best choice for your website. However, you may register your domain name as long as you want but not longer than 63 characters.
Unique Domain Name
This is the second most important facts that should be considered while choosing your domain name for your website. As we know that your domain name would be unique i.e. you shall not be allowed to register your domain name as superwebtricks.com
Before securing your domain name, just search the same on search engine like Google and make sure that Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) shows nothing or few results with your desire domain name.
Easy to Remember
I have told you that you should choose short and unique domain name. However, your domain name should also be easy to remember otherwise no one can ever remember to tell their friends about your site because they can’t remember the domain name.
In other words, the domain name like ayrndt.co.uk for a restaurant site may be read, hear and typed by people incorrectly.
Brand and Copyright
You should also keep in mind that whether your domain name is similar or same of a brand name already exists. This is because if you choose your domain name similar to a popular site or blog title or domain then it will confuse your users and may divert potential visitors to that another website.
Make sure you are not violating anyone’s trademarks otherwise it may kill your branded website and business resulting wasting time, money and fall back from where you had started. Additionally, you may log on to copyright.gov (U.S. Copyright Office) or copyright.gov.in (India Copyright Office) and search that whether you are infringing anyone’s copyright with your site’s domain.
Thus, you have to be careful when choosing domain name for your site that you’re not choosing a name same or too close to someone else’s trademark. This may result to change your domain name in future unexpectedly after establishing your online brand.
Represent your Contents
Your domain should describe your site contents. Try to use keywords that explain your website in a better way and help search engine and users to identify your site for specific niche.
In other words, if someone hears your domain name for the first time, they should be able to immediately guess the type of contents they get on your website. For Example: SuperWebTricks.com, Gmail.com, CAfirms.org etc.
Domain Extension
The .com domain extension is the best choice from the rest. This is because more than 50% of all websites are using .com domain including superwebtricks.com or google.com or yahoo.com etc.
Further, most of internet searcher by default types .com domain instead of .org or .in domain extension. Generally, users just type the domain name only and press Ctrl + Enter and visit the site. For Example: if you type only superwebtrick in your web browser and press Ctrl + Enter you will be on my site at www.superwebtricks.com
However, if you want to target any particular country users, you may prefer to choose .in, .ae, .au, .uk etc. and it also helps search engine to identify your site contents relevant for that particular country like .in domains are commonly used by the Indian based companies.
Valid Characters
You can use only the ASCII letters ‘a’ through ‘z’ (in a case-insensitive manner), the digits ‘0’ through ‘9’, and the hyphen (‘-‘) for your domain name.
In other words, you are not permitted to use other symbols, punctuation marks, or white space in your domain name. viz. apostrophe ’ ‘ brackets [ ] ( ) { } ⟨ ⟩ colon : comma , ، 、dash ‒ ellipsis … . . . exclamation mark ! full stop, period . hyphen ‐ question mark ? quotation marks ‘ ’ “ ” ‘ ‘ ” ” semicolon ; slash, and stroke etc.
Additionally, you should ignore the confusing characters, abbreviations and numbers like 4 (four), u(You), 0(zero), etc. and keywords in domain like topwebsite.com, number1site.com, or bestblog.com
Social Networks
I strongly recommend you to check the user name on social networks for your desire domain name for your site. Thus, you should check the availability of your username and secure them at least on most popular social networks. For Example: twitter.com/yourdomain and facebook.com/yourdomain etc.
Have you selected domain name for your site or blog?