What’s In A Domain Name?

Your domain name is your personal address on the web. It should reflect your company, your business, your products and services, and your geographical area. Oh, and it should be clear and concise while remaining as short as possible too. How do you get all that in such a small domain name? Read below for some pointers.

1. Start with your company name. Of course some of your customers will be looking for your company name, so it’s always a good choice to start with. Quad-BSystems.com might be a nice place to start. We always recommend a .com address. People really aren’t paying that much attention to .net domains anymore. Unless a .org fits for you, you’re better of sticking with a .com
2. Add your products and services. So, if someone isn’t looking for you by name, you’ll want to come up for your chosen products and services. So you might end up with Quad-BSystemsWebSiteDesignAndDevelopment.com.
3. Next, throw in a target area. People searching for “Website Design and Development” will be inundated with billions of results. Adding a target area will help you in search results; Quad-BSystemsWebsiteDesignandDevelopmentTonawandaNewYork.com
4. Now, that’s a mouthful. Time to shorten it up a bit. Let’s start with the target area, and make it shorter and less specific. WNY captures our entire area nicely, and is a heck of a lot shorter. Quad-BSystemsWebsiteDesignandDevelopmentWNY.com
5. Now, focus your service. Try and shorten it while keeping the keywords they should search for. For us, we’d end up with Quad-BSystemsWebDesignWNY.com
6. Ok, now for your company name. Can you shorten it in any way? Since our full name has a hyphen in it, we’re a bit of a special case. Any kind of symbols are generally frowned upon in a domain name because people have to remember not only the name, but also where the symbol should go. In our case, someone would have to remember if it was Quad-B webdesign or Quadb-webdesign, etc. So we just remove it to make it easier. And for us we’d end up with QuadBWebDesignWNY.com.

So that’s how to arrive at your domain name. Here’s a few other tips:

1. Alliteration’s Actually Awesome. Using alliteration can help your domain name sound “catchy”. For those non-writing nerds, alliteration is using the same first letter for each word such as WallysWebWork.com
2. Avoid really long domain names, but also avoid really short domain names too. QBWDWNY might be a good domain name for email or even a business card, but it says nothing for your website otherwise.
3. We’re using capitals to make it easier to read, but capitals don’t matter in your domain name. So purchasing QUADB.com is the same as quadb.com which is the same as qUAdB.com

Finally, check if your new name is available. You can do that by performing what’s called a “WHO IS” search. Type in your domain name and it will tell you if it is available or not. If it isn’t available immediately, don’t fret. Sometimes a domain name go up for sale and you can stalk it for a while until it expires and you can snatch it up. Or, another option, try being creative with your domain name. If QuadBWebDesignWNY.com isn’t available, switch up the pieces and parts of the domain name and see if QuadBWNYWebDesign.com or WNYWebDesignQuadB.com is.