Choosing A Domain Name

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva
Total Articles: 779
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The first step towards starting a successful website is to choose a highly relevant and short domain name, this will basically be the address of your website, if you decide your site's name to be bugsbunny (dot) com then that is your domain name, the concept of buying a domain name is actually straight-forward, there isn't much to know about except that if you're trying to rank in Google for specific keyword it would be best for you to decide whether to use the actual phrase that you're trying to rank for or a different phrase which is catchier and would allow people to remember your site a lot better, let's mention some of the most important aspects that you should keep in mind when choosing the right domain name.

SEO and user friendly:

Choosing a short domain name will allow your visitors to remember your site, this will in turn add to your bottom line and to your marketing strategy, let's illustrate this concept by providing an example, if you are selling digital cameras it would be smart to choose a domain name which reminds people of digital cameras such as digitalcameras (dot) com, that would be a perfect ...
... name for your website because it would be highly relevant to the product that you're trying to sell and because it would make it easier for people to find you. Unconventional domain names which is are not user or SEO friendly will look like: digital-electronics-web-store (dot) com, as you can see this specific domain name promotes electronics and it is not very targeted towards people who are looking for digital cameras. Some webmasters decide to create a word or a set of words in order to market their sites, this strategy can backfire if you don't know what you're doing or if you don't know how to brand a site.

Choosing the right company to buy a domain name from:

Knowing which company to buy from can also be a crucial piece of information to have, some companies which sell domain names have been put on the spot light because they have been buying domains that people inquire about for themselves in order to later on resell them at obviously a higher price, working with your current hosting provider may prove to be a good decision if you are happy with their customer service. If you choose to work with your own hosting company they will be able to set the DNS records correctly in order to match the configuration for their servers.

Watch out for price changes:

Price changes is also something that you should watch out for, some companies advertise a selling price which is extremely low let's say $1.99 however the yearly renewal price is set very high for instance $19-$24 compared to the average renewal yearly price which is off $9, other companies will even go as far as trying to upsell you on the value of a ".com" top-level domain compared to a ".info" TLD which is some instances may not be worth paying a high price.