Ah yes, the domain name. An incredibly important factor in determining the success of your website. The domain name is the URL of your website, which anybody is able to type into their web browser in order to visit your site.
There are a number of different opinions as to what makes a great and catchy domain name. However, I’ve found that even if one person’s opinion is different from the other; they can both still be right. Like a lot of what I’m about to explain, really depends on the type of your website, what it’s about, and the type of audience you’re looking to attract.
So here are a few different aspects of a domain name that brought out various people’s opinions and queries and how you should apply them to your own selection of domain name.
Number of Letters
I’ve often thought that the fewer letters there are in a domain name, the better. Which is true to some extent. Think of all the popular websites out there. There is one trend that’s quite hard to miss. Many of them contain 7-9 letters in total, spread across two words.
For example Facebook, YouTube, BlogSpot, TechCrunch, Alibaba, etc.
There’s a good reason for this logic, too. All of these websites are easy to remember. They’re all under 10 letters and consist of two words, which generally makes it very easy for them to… roll of the tongue if you like. There’s only one problem with this; most of the 8 letters, 2-word names are gone, so it can be quite hard to find one. Although, more than 10 letters is not necessarily a bad thing. More letters can mean better keywords…
Keywords
It’s one thing having a domain name that’s easy to remember, but it’s a very good idea to include good keywords within your domain. The top websites in the world that have names that are slightly strange, with no popular keywords such as Alibaba, most likely had quite a comfy budget for marketing and advertisement. Therefore, they were probably more concerned with the branding of their domain, rather than including keywords to help it rank well.
I should elaborate; Including keywords within a domain helps with your ranking in search engines, simply because users will be searching the terms that are included within the URL. This is why many websites can easily get away with extra letters in their domain. They’re able to include popular keywords, that are also easy to remember.
Branding
Perhaps a good option for those who have a large budget for marketing, or maybe just really want to push their own brand into the world. Most websites that have a unique brand name, will sell their own products which they’ve obviously created, and are looking to set themselves apart by branding their products.
So again, it depends on what you’re website is for. Focusing on branding would be a good option if this aspect is important to your business and you have set a good budget for getting your name out there. If not, either of the other two options is perfect.
Overall, it really depends on your long-term goals as to which aspect you decide to focus on. Be prepared to lay down the cash if you go down the branding route. A short domain will generally be remembered a lot better by people, but then one with better keywords will be able to rank more easily in search engines.
So there’s a little bit of info to help you when selecting your next famous domain name. Make sure you give me some credit when you’re a millionaire because of it!
