Making The Most Of Your Domain Name

Tweet

Planning

Before you pick a domain, there are a few factors that should be taken into consideration, which are based around your niche, target audience and brand. The good news is that you can pick almost anything related to your idea. The bad news is that so can anyone else and as such picking a short unique domain can be quite difficult.

So let's ask some questions

1. What type of website are you planning to host and what content will it contain?
2.  What is the niche market and audience? How are you going to find them and why?
3. Have you done market research and found SEO friendly keywords? Can they be used in the URL?
4. Plan for the long run, is this a niche that's developing and can you grab a domain related to its development?
5. View other variations of the domain and see if there's any similar competition using those words. Although this sounds like a lot for researching a domain, it's worth it. You're going to be investing your time and effort into a possible brand and project which needs to be short, punchy and informative; but at the same time not generic. Generic domain names can cause your brand to struggle under the weight of SEO. Look at some of the major brands out there - Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, BuzzFeed etc. They're all using very unique brand names.

The unofficial, official guidelines

Stick with a simplistic domain TLD such as .com, .co.uk, .net or .org. Make sure the domain is easy to spell and not ambiguous. For example, not everyone can distinguish between principal and principle correctly! - Try to avoid using other brand names in your domain If you're unsure of if your domain name is easy to access, ask a friend over the phone to tell you how they would spell or find it. If you need to thoroughly explain it, it's probably better to go back to the drawing board! So you've found a great domain, but how do you create a great site? As you've pre-planned your niche, target audience, branding and SEO friendly information, creating your site content should be very easy. We offer a wide range of supportive tools that can help you with this, including Installatron - which allows you to easily install one of many platforms including Wordpress, Magento, Joomla and OSCommerce. You don't need to invest thousands into a website to make it successful. With a bit of research and support, you can get one that's just right.

Some useful tools

There are plenty of useful tools out there but some of these will help: Google Keyword Tool†- This tool allows you to search a keyword for your niche and find high ranking SEO related terms Bustaname†- This tool allows you to specify keywords which will then prompt you with available domain names related to those words. Impossibility! - Is a nifty tool that adds nouns, verbs, adjectives etc to your keyword!

Remember, picking the right domain name can be a real help with your brand/niche. But the real success will come from great content, great backlinks and most importantly, a great service.