Choosing a domain name for your website

You'd think that choosing the domain name for your company would be a very easy step. However, there are a number of considerations to give that don't cross the minds of many until it is too late.

The obvious choice is to choose a domain that is the same as your company name. This isn't always practical though, not to mention available if you have a somewhat generic name or one that is likely to have already been purchased.

Nonethless, it is an obvious choice on the basis that if people know what your company is called they'll hopefully stand a much higher chance of finding you online.

If your company name is available in domain form then you should still be seeking to purchase it if only to stop potential visitors typing it in and ending up on a competitors site - something that happens much more often than you might imagine. After all, you can always have the domain redirected so that it automatically transfers your visitors to the domain on which you have chosen to host your website.

Multiple domain purchases

For example, if your company name is J S Smith Electronics, but you want to brand your online venture as 'DiscountMicrowaves', there is nothing stopping you purchasing both domains and making sure that anyone typing www.jssmithelectronics.com gets redirected to www.discountmicrowaves.com; you've kept your potential traffic.

Don't lose that domain

If you're starting out afresh, with a completely new venture and brand, you would be well advised to check domain name availability in the first instance. It never ceases to amaze us how many people go to the lengths of registering a company name formally, getting months down the line - and then discovering that the domain name they want to reflect the company name, and another remotely like it, isn't available.

You might also find that some remarkably short, easy to remember, branding friendly and snappy domain names are still out there if you search carefully.

Domain names that are easy to remember are always useful - because there is nothing worse than a domain name that a customer will never remember, give up on trying to find and end up discovering one of your biggest rivals sites instead.

Don't let that fool you into thinking that short and snappy is always best though. For a start, not too many people realise that you can have a domain name up to 67 characters in length - though we don't recommend you do!

Relevant to your business

If you own Thomas Laptops and Cases, and discover that TLC.com is available - it isn't necessarily suitable if thomaslaptops.com is also out there! We'd certainly recommend choosing the latter in this case. To begin with it contains your company name without abbreviation and almost certainly two of the words your visitors may go looking for - 'thomas' and 'laptops'. Not all search engines rank your site by the domain name, but the likes of BING do and you'll find it will carry a lot of weight too.

Domain names with hyphens in them

Let's imagine that thomaslaptops.com has been bought by someone else. How about hyphenating it? That is, Thomas-laptops.com. Well, hyphens have advantages and disadvantages.

To begin with they can be easily forgotten by users. On the plus side, they can also be much easier to read. At a glance, thomaslatops.com isn't as easy to read for most people as thomas-laptops.com, especially if seen on the side of a van, car, bus, or in print.

Many search engines read hyphens as seperators, so they distinguish the words either side of them - so there is an advantage there too. That can be countered by someone saying they visited Thomas Laptops dot com to a friend who then types www.thomaslaptops.com and finds your competitor site instead of yours at www.thomas-laptops.com - because hyphens are often forgotten when people pass on domain names to colleagues or friends.

Our view is that if both are available - take them both and get one to redirect to the other. It's the best of both worlds and you cover yourself in the event of a user slipping up when they look for you.

You'll notice that the domain name you are reading this on uses hyphens, and we've never experienced too many issues with it (and it contains keywords that are important to our sector, the market we operate in and a geographical area we serve). You'd still find us under our trading name of ClarityWEB though - so don't be too afraid to pick a domain that isn't a duplicate of the brand. If a site is optimised properly, users searching for your brand name will still find you.

Getting creative with prefixing and suffixing

You can often 'create' a domain name close to the one you wanted with a handy use of prefix or suffix. For example, let's say you wanted www.andersonlaw.co.uk but it wasn't available.

You could try the hyphen to begin with, looking for www.anderson-law.co.uk, but if that wasn't available you could suffix it with 'firm' - as in www.andersonlawfirm.co.uk. Or, if you work in a specific town or city, suffix it with the City name, such as www.anderson-law-london.co.uk - so you've now got your geographic location in your domain name too.

Prefixing is a little more tricky, but www.chooseandersonlaw.co.uk or www.choose-anderson-law.co.uk are two options, both of which have a marketing tagline hook to them by subconsciously telling your potential clients that they should choose your company.

What type of domain should you buy?

In respect of the type of domain you should choose, well it depends on where you are and the nature of your business. Most of our clients will choose .co.uk domains because they're in the UK, but they'll often secure, or ask us to, the .com and .net variants too - if only to ensure no-one else gets them and attempts to trap their potential visitors.

A .org domain name describes a non-profit organisation, whilst .eu domains (European Union) are increasingly popular.

Think before you buy

You probably have a good idea of what you want, but you should give serious thought to making sure it is entirely suitable to your business, your brand, what people might search for and how easy it is for them to find you and remember.

Hopefully this guide will have given you a few useful pointers, and you know where we are if you need a little more direction or advice.