Choosing a Domain Name
By CleverSage | February 11, 2008
Choosing a domain name for your site or blog is one of the most important choices that you can make and charts the success or failure of your online presence. When choosing the domain name CleverSage.com for this site, I had several options. The conclusion of CleverSage was made after factoring in how easy it was to type, the brandability, the ease of remembering and ease of recalling the name.
Keyword-Rich Domains
Domain names that are filled with keywords that describe your product, service or information you are providing are great for search engine optimization. However, building a viable brand that can extend into the offline world is very difficult if your site is not easily memorable. This-site-is-about-making-money-online-and-marketing.com, while keyword-rich and descriptive of what your site offers, is practically useless for memorization or gaining direct traffic through your browser to your site.
Brandable Domain Names
Brandable domain names are one of the better methods of choosing a domain name for your site or blog. There are thousands of successful companies that have established an unbelievable presence, both online and offline. Yahoo!, Google, abd Adobe are just a couple of the great businesses and sites that have developed an amazing following and business. Prior to each of these businesses’ success, their names had little or no value in the marketplace. For example: When you think of Adobe you now think of desktop applications, and there are really no other associations that come to mind when you hear “Adobe.” The same goes for Google, when you hear “Google” you think of internet search and online applications and little else comes to mind.
Made-Up Domain Names
With the recent popularity of Web 2.0 many sites, blogs and businesses have gone the route of creating fictional domain names they may or may not have any relevance to what their site is about. Thousands of sites have sprung up with creative and clever names. Sites like Yelp, Flickr, Clickbooq, Gusto are among some of the smartly conjured up domain names that had no associations at all before coming into service. These domain names are often good choices if properly thought-out as they are short and easy to remember. Be careful when choosing your spelling variation for these types of domains, however, as you can end up losing thousands of visitors in the long-term due to misspellings. Sites like Flickr have overcome this by massive branding efforts, something that can be extremely difficult without lots of time, energy and reources.
Generic Brandable Keyword-Rich Domain Names
Some of the best domain names available are generic brandable domains. Sites like Cars.com, Pets.com, Flowers.com and Business.com are great for driving highly-targeted traffic through both direct navigation as well as search engine traffic. While these domains are some of the best to have when building a business, they are nearly all taken and obtaining one may cost in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. If you are lucky enough to be able to build around one of these great domains consider yourself a step ahead of other site owners (you have the natural type-in traffic already there).
Summary
When creating your site or blog be sure to consider all of the factors above when choosing your online identity. You will spend huge amounts of time and energy and an untold amount of money promoting, enhancing, and developing your online presence. Choosing a domain name is something that should not be taken lightlly.
One last note, when registering your domain name be sure to get as many different spelling variations and extensions that you can afford. Having someone steal your valuable traffic and branding that you have poured your blood, sweat and tears in, is something easy to avoid by planning ahead.
Topics: Branding, Domain Names |