What’s In A Name?
Choosing and Acquiring Your Website Domain Name
By Michael Wilford

If you are currently considering getting a website for your business and are weighing your options for who you will have develop that site, there is one aspect of the process you can begin right now. That is deciding on and acquiring your website domain name. This is certainly something you can do yourself, but move carefully and deliberately. Once you've spent time and money promoting your website and it becomes established with your clients and the search engines, you don't want to change the domain name because you’ve thought of a better one. Here are some tips to choosing and registering your domain name:

Short and Sweet - Pick a name which is as short as possible, but still distinctly related and unique to your business. "Jim Bob's Antiques & Collectibles" might not want a website named www.jimbobsantiquesandcollectibles.com. That's just too long for someone to remember and type easily. www.jbac.com is short but pretty meaningless. Better choices might be jimbobs.com, or both jimbobsantiques.com and jimbobscollectibles, with both domains pointing to the same website or to two different websites, each specialized and optimized for the search engines. If there is a keyword you want the search engines to pick up on, such as "antiques," including it in your domain name is very beneficial.

Hyphenate or Not? Use only letters, numbers and hyphens in the domain name, any other characters are not permitted. You may want to use a hyphen in the domain to get the one you want, such as jimbobs-antiques.com. Hyphenated domains have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that it opens up more options for domain names and that search engines may have an easier time distinguishing a keyword in the domain. The disadvantages are that people may forget about or not realize the hyphen should be there and get another site when they type it in (probably a competitor's site!). You have to be very clear when promoting your website, especially when speaking, to be sure the hyphen is recognized and included. Someone else recommending your site may not be as careful. So I would suggest using a hyphen only when you have to.

Branding or Keywords? I've mentioned how domain names can have keywords relevant to search engines. There are two paths you can go down in choosing your domain depending on the whether it is more important to promote the brand of your business or whether it is more important to get search engine traffic. For example, lets say your business is called John Smith and Sons, Inc. and you are selling gold plated keyrings. If a large part of your marketing plan is to get search engine traffic, it would be better to have a site called www.goldplatedkeyrings.com or www.gold-plated-keyrings.com rather than johnsmithandsons.com. If your business's brand is a major marketing component, the name should be part of the domain. For a company like Coca Cola, where brand is everything, it obviously makes more sense to have www.coca-cola.com and www.cocacola.com (they both go to the same site) rather than www.sodapop.com.

Dot Com is the Bomb - When possible use the .com extension for your domain. Dot Com is the most widely recognized and credible domain extension and carries with it a certain cachet of respectability. If you can't get a domain you want with the .com extension, .net is the next best thing (.org for non-profits). Try to avoid some of the more fledgling domains such as .biz, .name, .us, .ws, .tv or .info. They may become fairly commonplace in the next few years but right now their novelty doesn’t work in your favor. Domains such as .ws (for website) or .tv are really country specific domains, for Western Samoa and Tuvalu respectively, both small countries which are licensing these domains for a profit. But there is the chance that someday when they re-negotiate their contract the deal may fall through, locking out current or future users of the domain. This actually happened with the .tm domain (from Turkmenistan) which was frozen for 5 years until a new deal was reached. There are companies selling all types of domains, some of which are not sanctioned top-level domains and actually only work on a small percentage of computers!

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