Choosing a domain name is one of the first steps in creating your online presence.  If you’re trying to learn how to start a blog, or build a website, your domain name can help you or it can hurt you.  Understand the factors that come into play and you can make an informed decision that’s best for your business.

TRADITIONAL MARKETING

First, let’s look at this from a traditional marketing standpoint.  Traditional marketing is marketing in the real world.  Advertising on billboards, in magazines, on the sides of buses.  Those are indirect advertising methods.  Today, it’s common to include a web address in traditional advertising, which is why you should care about your domain name for traditional marketing purposes.
If you have a business that will be doing a lot of indirect marketing, advertising, or communicating directly with people, you should think about a few things.

Do you want dashes in your website?  Dashes look spammy in domain names.  Especially if you have more than one dash in your domain name.  It also makes it more difficult to get your website to the first page of Google search results.  Type in any random phrase and see how many of the domain names have hyphens compared to how many don’t.

Dashes in your domain name can also make it difficult to communicate your web address to people.  Sometimes you might have to explain that it is the hyphen character, not the word hyphen.  When you tell people your web address, they’ll often forget the dash.  If you don’t own the same domain name without the dash, you could be inadvertently sending traffic to a competitor.  You want to make it as easy as possible for people to visit your website, so adding a dash to your domain name can often be a liability.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a very important role in choosing a domain name.  First of all, you’ll have to check to see if the domain name you want is available.  Most of the really good domain names aren’t available.  You might also want to check to see if that domain name, user id, or phrase is available on other websites you’ll be creating to supplement your website.  For example, is the exact Twitter name available?  Facebook page?  Youtube?  Take that into consideration depending on how far you’re extending your marketing efforts.

One thing that can make a big difference with your internet marketing efforts is having an exact match keyword domain.  For example, if I want to target the keyword phrase, “make money online” for my website, an exact match domain would be makemoneyonline.com, or makemoneyonline.net, etc.

Many people that make money online with niche websites will only enter a market if they can get an exact match domain name.  It makes it a little easier to get to the first page of search engine results when you have an exact match domain name, although Google is “turning down” the importance of an exact match domain.

Since a lot of exact match domain names are taken, many people choose a phrase match domain name.  That means the phrase is in the domain, but extra words or numbers are added to the front or back of the keyword phrase.  For example, makemoneyonlineBS would be a phrase match domain.

The top level domain (TLD) is what comes at the end of the domain, such as .com, .net, .org.  People always wonder what’s the best to have.  From an SEO perspective, .com is the best to have.  I haven’t done any testing of my own, but I have seen numerous studies that convinced me it’s easier to get on the first page of search results with a .com TLD, followed by .net and .org.

I’m not saying that you can’t get to number one with any of the other TLD’s, it’s just a little bit easier with a .com at the end.  Run a search on any keyword phrase and take a look at how many of the results end in .com.  It’s pretty typical to find most are .com, no matter what you type in at Google.

Anytime you see new TLD names come on the market, be skeptical.  It might be tempting because now you can get an exact match domain name, but the search engines don’t always trust the new TLD’s and there’s a reason for that.

When a new domain name comes on the market, many domain companies sell them cheap hoping that people will adopt the new TLD and they’ll ultimately make more sales.  When you have very cheap domain names, such as .info when it came out, spammers buy these domain names and use them to build spam websites, send spam emails, etc.  They do it because it’s cheap and they can burn through 10 of them for the same price as one .com domain name.  Take that into consideration before you buy that cheap TLD domain name.

BRANDING

After reading about the benefits of exact match domain names and keywords in domain names, you may be wondering why anyone would want to choose a brand name for their domain instead of one with keywords.  The simplified answer is that a brand name can help you stand out.

When you use a generic domain, such as makemoneyonline.com, you blend in with all the rest of the keyword based websites.  It might help you from an SEO perspective, but it won’t help you gain a larger audience. If Google had gone with search4websites.com, things might not have turned out so good for them.  All the major companies I can think of have brand name domains, not generic keyword phrases.

Another plus for unique brand names is that you can use the domain for anything you want.  If you try to start a website about dogs and it doesn’t work out, you can use the same domain for an entirely different project.  If you used the domain name dogworld.com, it wouldn’t make much sense to use that domain later for a wedding website.  Obviously, no one thinks that their website will fail, but sometimes things don’t work out as expected.

Before you choose a unique brand name, do a search using Google.  Even if the domain name is available and the twitter name is available, run a search.  You might be surprised at what you find.  It’s better to check it out before you invest the time and energy only to later discover that there’s a popular sex product with the same name you decided to use.

One thing thing that deserves special attention with respect to brand names is using your own personal name.  When you use your own name for your website, it limits your options.  If you create a successful website using your own name, you are an essential part of that company.  It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to sell your website to someone else.  There’s nothing wrong with doing it that way, it just limits your options.

CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME

Consider the factors above before you choose a domain name.  Obviously, many things will be determined by the type of website you’re starting.  If you’re buying a domain just for a small niche website, you’ll probably want an exact match domain.  If you’re launching a major website with the potential for serious growth, you might want to go with a unique brand name.  Know the different factors of choosing a domain name and you can’t go wrong.