The Office Copier

What’s the one make-it-or-break-it item that your online business needs to stand out from the crowd and become a huge success?

A great domain name!

The domain name is what people enter into their browsers when they want to get to your site - it’s the part that comes after the http:// or the www. It’s your web address. Having something they can remember without looking it up each time or keeping it in their bookmarks, to be lost among the all the other addresses, is the one thing you can do to get visitors to return to your site and word-of-mouth free traffic.

It’s said that all the great domain names are gone, but that’s about as certainly not the case. Here are a few simple guidelines that will make your domain name — and your business — a memorable and popular online destination.

1. Choose a Dot-Com

The primary rule is, go for the dot-com domain extension, which is typed as .com. This is the Main Street of the virtual|online world, and the one that most people will enter into their browsers regardless of what your domain extension actually is. While .net and .org were popular for a while, and then .us, .biz,.info and .name took the stage, people always revert back to .com — no matter how many different country code top level domains are launched into the mainstream, like .cc, .ws, .to, .cn and others.

2. Choose something memorable

You want your business name to be your domain name too, if possible. So if your flower shop is called Felicty’s Flowers, you want to get felicitysflowers.com, assuming it’s available. If that domain name isn’t available, try adding a dash, like felicitys-flowers.com or a secondary descriptive word like felicitysflowersonline.com or prettyfelicitysflowers.com. If you’re creative, you’ll have no problem coming up with something that matches your business name and is one your customers will find memorable.

Keep in mind that if you use a dash in your domain name, which some Search Engine Optimization experts say attracts more free traffic to your site, you need to say the dashes if you use your domain name in an audio product or commercial; so it would be “felicitys dash flowers dot com”.

Most people typing in your domain name later will not type the dashes.

3. Get another variation

If you’re fortunate enough to grab a great domain name without the dashes, then you might want to get the same name with dashes between the words as well. You can put both domain names up on your server as mirror sites to get the benefits of SEO as well as the ease of typing without the dashes.

You may also want to consider getting the .net or .org variation or even another extension or two to use as sister sites for your main dot com site… maybe you could put your forum on the .net, or use your .com for your main product and .net for your business background information site.

Even if you’re searching for a domain name that you think might not be available, using your creativity and trying a variety of word combinations ought to allow you to lock down a memorable domain name that will attract people to your website.

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It can be quite time consuming checking domain name availability as you find each successive name you come up with has already been registered.

So why not buy an expired domain name? Don’t know where to look? You’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of domain names for sale on our site: http://www.crazydomainsales.com

Filed under: The Office Copier on October 25th, 2008