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5 considerations when choosing a Domain Name
Choosing a good domain name is a very important first step to owning a successful website.
Your domain name is how people find your website online – for example bills-fishing-supplies.co.uk is a domain name. Somebody types this in and they are taken to a Fishing Supplies website someone called Bill has set up – and chosen a very appropriate domain for!
But what constitutes good? In this 2 part article, we’ve compiled a top ten list of DO’s and DON’T’s when it comes to picking the perfect web address.
Top DONT’s When Choosing A Domain
1. DON’T pick something that’s hard to spell correctly. A lot of people could give up trying to correctly spell the domain necessary-requirements.co.uk – you should avoid choosing a domain like this.
2. DON’T dilute your website and domain’s focus too much. If an entrepreneur (we’ll call him Steve) started a business running sporting days out, he might perhaps find that there is also an untapped market in the area for someone to hire out golf clubs. As any smart businessman would, Steve wants to seize this opportunity. However, rather than registering a domain like sporting-days-out-and-golf-club-hire.co.uk, Steve would be better off starting two websites – maybe one with the domain sporting-days-out.co.uk and another at golf-club-hire-st-albans.co.uk. These websites could happily link to one another, and be clearly affiliated, but would mean that consumers aren’t at risk of being confused about what exactly Steve’s companies do, and the services they provide. The other bonus here is that with seperate sites, each one is more likely to show up on search engine results for the relevant search terms.
3. DON’T pick something that could be mis-read as something else. The best way to illustrate this might be by mentioning our favourite example: Who Represents are a company that provide contact details of celebrity PR agents, given the celebrity’s name. Their domain, however, is whorepresents.com, which might be misunderstood to be a website providing gifts for ladies of the night. This is very amusing on the one hand, but on the other could offend potential clients, and as a result drive away business.
4. DON’T pick something that has the same letter repeated several times in a row. We’d normally say repeating the same letter 3 times is the absolute maximum, but for some letters even this can be confusing. With S’s it’s almost okay, for example successspeed.co.uk is a just-about-legible domain name that might be used by a racing team, but selllearning.co.uk might be really pushing it. In this case, the shape of the letter L means that it can be really difficult to discern how many of them are actually there.
6. DON’T choose something that includes a trademark owned by another company. At the very least, the other company can have ownership of this domain taken away from you (and you won’t get your money back), but more seriously, this is basically trademark infringement, and therefore all the penalties and suchlike associated with that will also apply.
So there you have it – ten top tips for choosing a great domain name for your company’s website! Let us know how you get on in the comments section below, and good luck!
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