Tips for Choosing a Successful Domain Name

Choosing  a good domain name is a crucial step to your online success, so here are some good domain name tips. You may hear people say that the name of the domain doesn’t matter, but I highly disagree. Here’s what I’ve learned about domain names from experience.

It usually goes like this, the shorter, more catchier and relevant your domain name, the better. If you are choosing a domain for your brand or business, then you will want the exact name in your domain. Other than that, then you will want to choose the most relevant domain for your website, blog, lp, squeeze page or etc… It’s best if you can choose a domain name that explains what your site is about. Like for my landing pages and mini sites, I like having the name of the product or service in my domain url. Also, if you are getting domains for your brand or business, then you probably want to buy up as many similar domains as possible…. Or you may have some complications or competition in the future.

Does .com or .net really matter?

Yes, usually the .com will always be the most powerful and best, so get that first. However, .org .edu are usually for informational only sites but can rank well since Google looks at them as authoritative sites. I usually only get .com or .net and sometimes a few others when I see a good one available.

Does the format of your domain name matter?

Yes, as in format I mean this “www.makemoneyexample.com” to this “www.make-money-example.com”. A domain with no hyphens is best, but if they are all taken up and you have one available with hyphens, then use that.

What’s the best domain for SEO?

This again would be the name that is most relevant to your site with the least amount of hyphens. What I do is look at all the popular relevant keywords for my new site and choose a domain name from that list. If you have your main keywords in your domain name, you’ll be able to rank easier for the keywords. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and be on the front page of Google before you even get content on it. I’ve learned that Google looks at domain names to partially figure out what the website is about, this also will factor in how important it is and where it should be placed in the search engine results pages (serps). I’ve had this happen to me only a few times. I bought the domain and registered it. As soon as my dns was changed over, my site was already on the first page of Google for competitive keywords.

Where should I buy my domain name?

The #1 place to buy or register a domain name is Godaddy, they usually are always the cheapest. I’ve bought some from them and I’ve bought some from my hosting company, Hostgator. Why? Godaddy has the cheapest domain names, but registration and all the addons they have can get quite annoying. Not only that, when you register a domain name at Godaddy, they allow the public to have access to all your registration information thru Whois sites. I didn’t realize this until I was getting spammed and learned it was from my new Godaddy domains. They make you pay additional fee to hide it, or just use your business address, email etc.. and you’ll be fine. While Hostgator domains automatically hides your personal info for you. For me, I would rather pay the higher fee for a domain name with my hosting, hostgator just because it’s more convenient, easier and HG rocks!

That’s all the domain name tips that I can think of, if anyone has some more tips please share. Remember that I’m not the Almighty Internet Marketing Guru, these are my opinions from my own experiences and not everything that works for me might not work the same for you.