A good domain name is the very first thing is to consider when setting up a website. A domain name is the name that the website is known by, for example: www.example.co.nz.
It is always preferable to try to find a relevant name that is easy to spell and easy to remember. Don’t use slang or shortcuts like u instead of you. Avoid using words that might have two spellings like extra and xtra or bite and byte. Avoid using numbers altogether; they always cause confusion.
Try to keep the domain name short as the longer it is the more the chance is that it will be misspelled. Short and simple is best. Long names can be hard to avoid sometimes but do try to keep it short.
Spend some time trying to get the domain name to contain one or two key words. These are words that describe your business services so that at first glance it indicates what to expect from your website. For example “southernroses.co.nz” or “alpinefishing.co.nz”. They should also be words that people would use if they were searching for your services on a search engine such as Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But don’t overdo it – for example: www.southislandalpinetroutfishingguides.co.nz quite apart from being far too long, would likely attract rather negative scrutiny by search engines due to keyword “stuffing”. Use common sense and don’t try to beat the search engines at their own game.
Once commonly used was a hyphen to either use when your preferred choice was taken or a long time ago when search engines didn’t know how to deal with words all strung together. Not such a good idea now though. People will forget the hyphen for sure and end up on someone else’s website.
Try to come up with a domain name that is catchy, memorable and describes what you do. Then see if it’s available. Nearly all the good domain names are already registered and it can be hard to find the exact one for you. And make sure you’re not stepping on the copyright issues of another business or website.
If you are in New Zealand, try to keep your domain name a .nz, that’s if you mainly do business in NZ . This helps to instantly locate you in New Zealand which is important information for search engines and it’s just slightly faster for clients from NZ, especially if you are using NZ hosting (which is highly preferable).
Don’t expect to solve the domain name puzzle quickly. It can take hours and hours of thinking, research and thinking some more. And look at the domain name you’ve carefully chosen to see if it can be misread. Sometimes one can get fixated on a particular name and fail to notice it can be read two ways. Like for example www.teacherstalking.com (this is actually for sale at $3995 USD!)
If you think you might need some help finding a good domain name, registering it, setting it up on a server and creating a Google friendly “holding page” just get it touch. I’ll be happy to sort it all out for you and we’ll only charge for the domain registration.
Ken.
