Here are some quick and dirty guidelines for picking out a domain name. This is part of a chapter in my upcoming booklet about setting up your website. Without further ado:
1. Do not pick a name with hyphens, underscores or dashes.
People don’t know the difference between them. Furthermore, imagine you’re in the elevator with someone, trying to tell someone your url (aka domain name) and you have to say “double u, double u, double u, dot the, hyphen, coffee, hyphen, guy, dot com.” Chances are really good that the person you’re talking to may not understand if you mean “hyphen (-)” or “underscore (_).” They also won’t remember where to put the hyphens, basically they’ll get the url wrong.
It’s just too complicated. Get rid of the hyphens and just get a domain name without dashes, hyphens or underscores.
2. Pick something simple and straightforward.
Preferably, pick the name of your company, but if it’s not available, pick a name related to what you do. More info about this is in the next point.
3. Perform keyword research to pick out a domain name.
What am I talking about?
Keyword research basically means researching what words people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for something.
Keyword research may be completely irrelevant if you are only interested in a personal blog, and don’t care about getting readers. If you care about getting some people to read your blog or visit your site, you may want to do some keyword research.
Here’s how to perform keyword research in a nutshell:
Go to Google and type in “keyword research tool” in the search bar. Click on the “Google Adwords Keyword Tool” or on the “word tracker” tool. Read the instructions on the website for how to execute the search.
For instance, using the Google tool, if I were to type in the keyword “running” and then search on that word, I get a list of several hundred running related words and phrases that people are typing into the Google search engine when they look up running related web sites.
From here, it can be as simple as going down the list of results and using these keywords to come up with your domain name. Another option is to find some other words that you hadn’t thought about and then research them. Be careful though, because it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and find yourself in an entirely different niche than you were intending.
There are a lot more things to consider when picking a domain name, specially when it comes to performing keyword research, but these 3 things should get you going.
That elevator example is perfect. I always roll my eyes when I see someone using hyphens, etc. in their URL. I even saw one that had 2 hyphens in a row in each place, like this: the–best–blog. If you have to get that creative, that means someone already has the domain name. Let go and move on! Thanks for the good post, happy ICLW.
Exactly, let it go and think of something else