Choosing the domain name for your website is like naming your
baby—in this case, your blog is your baby. If you put so much effort and
research into naming your biological baby, why not do the same for your digital
baby? And if names, as most cultures believe, have considerable impacts on the
lives of their bearers, then domain names too ought to impact the sites they
identify.
Why Do You Need a Domain
Name for Your Blog?
The takeaway from the ‘baby naming’ analogy above is that a domain
name is your website’s online identity. Hence, it should reflect what you want
to build with the site—this is what makes it credible. It should also foster
professionalism, depending on what that means in your niche.
If you plan on selling a product or service using your website, then
your domain name should elevatethe branding. This will ultimately come in handy
if you rely on the domain for your email addresses.
Factors to Consider
·
Goals and Objectives
Every business has goals and
objectives. It’s these two ideals that guide it. If you treat your website as a
business—and you should—then it’s goals and objectives must also guide every
part of it, including the domain name.
Here are some points your domain
name can reflect:
o
Your website’s name—the word or
phrase that appears on your header—and topic.
o
What you hope to achieve using
the website.
o
Whether the site contentis
single-authored or multi-authored?
o
The tone and voice the content
employs.
o
You target audience.
·
Traffic Source
To get a firmer grip on choosing a
suitable domain name for your website, you ought to also consider from where
you expect most of the traffic to the site to come. Is it from:
o
Search Engines?
Traffic from this source come and go, although you can convert some
of them to loyal visitors with much work. This works best for a daily news
blog, blogs focused on an upcoming one-time occasion—like a new movie release—and
helps to create a buzz.
In this case, your domain name should be SE optimised.
o
Loyal Readers
This sort of traffic thrives on engagement. You are looking to build
a community. One that you educate and learn from. While search engine traffic
can be beneficial, you are looking for people that will stay with you for a
long time.
In this case, your domain name should be branded and memorable.
·
Keywords and Branding
It can be difficult to integrate
both keywords and branding in your domain name, but if your brand name is
generic enough, then it’s possible you can achieve this.
o
Keywords in Your Domain Name
This is perfect if you are
interested in SE traffic. You can use Google AdWords tools to find generic
words that people search for on Google. Then you use one or two high-ranking
ones to create a domain name that communicates what your website is about.
Some good examples are TheMovieBlog.com and
DigitalPhotographySchool.com.
o
Branding Your Domain Name
Here, you are looking to create an identity, a community of loyal
visitors, and, perhaps, something that hasn’t been used before. You can use the
name of your company as a domain name, if it’s memorable.
Some good examples are domains4less.co.nz, CNN.com, and CocaCola.com.
As stated above, you
can integrate both branding and keywords to create a better effect. For
instance, CNN added the popular keyword ‘news’ to their branded domain to
create CNNnews.com.
·
Consider the Future
In factoring in the future when
creating your domain name you need to make sure to pick a name that isn’t going
to age and also make sure it encompasses your goals and objectives.
This is why it’s important to put
a lot of thought into your goals and objectives, so that they are not too
narrow. The last thing you want is realising later that your niche is bigger
than you thought and you can’t expand because of the limiting nature of your
domain name.
It’s just like creating a brick and mortar
business and naming it Analogue Photography—obviously in the past—only for
digital photography to become popular and you realise that the only way to
expand is to change your brand name.
·
Other Factors
These are the factors
that have been excessively discussed online. The fact that they are not
broadly discussed here doesn’t make them any less important. It only means you
may have bumped into them online several time.
o
Make your domain name memorable
in order to reduce the margin for error—that is, make it short as well as easy to
remember, pronounce, and spell.
o
Go for the [dot]com domain
extension.
o
Also grab the domain extension
for the country the website targets.
o
Avoid using the hyphen.
o
Avoid numbers and thus spare
visitors the trouble of wondering whether numbers in your domain should be
spelt or typed as digits.
o
Avoid misspellings.
o
Avoid trademarked names. You
could get sued and thus lose your domain name.
o
Secure multiple domain names
for the same website. This can mean also securing the [dot]net, [dot]org,
[dot]info et cetera versions of your domain name to prevent someone else from
registering them and feeding off your hard work.
It can also mean registering other keywords relevant to your brand
and redirecting them to your website—for instance, like registering both
onlinenews.com and internetnews.com and linking them to the same website. This
will help you capture more type-in traffic.
o
Check to make
sure the domain name you want to use isn’t blacklisted by search engines or
doesn’t have a bad or an unsuitable history.
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