For newbies on the web, the question is “How do I start my own website?”. First: What do you want your website to portray? Thoughtful consideration of your website’s future direction will help you in deciding on the optimum domain name for your site. One of the best things you can do for your fledgling website is to bestow it with an appropriate, catchy, easy to remember domain name. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.
OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it. But you really wanted it badly. Can the domain name still be acquired? The answer is a qualified YES. It’s possible, but there are conditions. However, with a little luck and enginuity you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for. Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies to get the domain name you want:
Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com. Is it always the best strategy? Maybe, maybe not. If you are dealing with an already well known name, generally the answer would be no, as most web surfers would usually just enter the non-hyphenated version in, and end up at your competitors’ website instead. Not the desired result! Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website. Definitely shorter is better. But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name. But be careful: the last thing you want is to cause internet domain name confusion because you have decided on a domain name registration that is so close to a major competitor’s name that you end up losing business to them.
Longer or Shorter? If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name. At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be. Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com When choosing my domain name I wanted something that in a few words would tell the web surfer what to expect from my website. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name. Remember, keep it short!
Brand Name or Generic Whether or not to call your website by a brand name or to make the name a more generic description of your business online is the question. Definitely if your business is known by a fairly well known brand name, then you would want to try and secure that as your domain name. Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer. But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website. If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name. But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well. People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names. A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike. So if possible cover all the bases. You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better. A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one. To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine. Bottom line, the beginning phase of how to start your own website is choosing the right domain name.
