How to Choose a Good Domain Name for Your Blog or Website
A good domain name always play a vital role for a successful blog or website. And, it’s worth spending some time to choose one cleverly.
Many a times, people say “What’s in a name?” But, in online world a great name or a great domain name is all you need to kick-start your online venture.
A well picked better domain name can take your website to the top with lesser efforts. On the contrary, a hastily picked or poor/bad domain name can be the cause of your online failure.
Webmasters usually don’t give much importance while registering a domain name. This is mainly due to lack of awareness/information and the initial pre-success period associated with less expectations (casualness).
What a good domain name can do for you?
1. Represents your brand identity.
2. Helps to get links from external sites.
3. Play a vital role in your company or blog logo.
4. People/visitors associate and remember your site by the domain name.
How a good domain name should be?
1. Easy to remember and should be either 2 or 3 word combinations. The best one is two-word combination. Although single-word domain name is the best, I bet you can’t find one, unless you are a millionaire.
2. Short and catchy – Yes, size matters, when it comes to domain name. The more shorter and catchy the name, the more better it is. Restrict the letter count to less than 13. Around 8 to 10 letters in a domain is considered very good.
3. Meaningful and reflects your online business.
4. Go for gTLDs or generic Top Level Domains like .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov or .info, if your website is for wider audience and not restricted to any specific country.
5. If your business is country specific then you should go for ccTLDs or country code Top level Domains like .co.uk, .org.au, .co.in for United Kingdom, Australia and India respectively.
6. Do not go for names with hyphen. Earlier people were crazy to buy hyphenated multi-word domain names which are rich in keywords. But, due to the introduction of penalty by Google for exact match domain name the trend is no more.
7. Shouldn’t be a copy, or duplicate of an existing domain name. For example – You can’t buy a domain name like SeoWordPress.com. WordPress is already patent. Yes, you can buy like SeoWP.com. Even, you should not go for any short form of an existing domain name.
Things you should consider..
1. Exact match domain: Don’t try to include your every single word in the domain name to get the keyword benefit. One keyword is OK.
The problem with keyword rich domain name is – You will go for more number of exact match keyword anchor text (same as domain name) from external sites for SEO benefits resulting in penalty by Google Penguin. As such Google is demoting exact-match domain names from its search results.
2. Domain registration period: Domain registered for a period of 1 year is considered as spammy by Google. And, it is in it’s search engine signal also.
Try to register your domain name for a period of 5 years or more for SEO benefit. Checkout this article – How domain age plays a big role for higher search engine ranking?
3. Non-sense domain name: This is a trend now, due to unavailability of choice keywords. Here you have to combine 2 words or 3 words to make a catchy and non-sense domain name.
Tools to choose a Good domain name
Tryout the below tools to choose a best domain name for your site –
1. Domai.nr
3. NameBoy.com
6. Domize.com
If you want to buy a domain name, go for reputable ones like GoDaddy,Hostgator or JustHost.com. My favorite is JustHost.com because of their after sales service or assistance. The blog you are reading MoneyCTL.com is registered and hosted on JustHost.
