Picking a domain name for your website is one of THE MOST important decisions that you will make.

Yet, it isn't easy.  Choosing the wrong domain name could lead you to competitive disadvantage.  What if competitors have more memorable or better targetted keyword rich domains?  This can get you stuck in a tough position where it is tough to move and tough not to move your website to a new domain.  The thing is moving to a new domain can be quite a difficult AND painful process.  Years of advertising and URL recognition can get lost.

On the other hand, choosing the right domain name could mean that your business online is going to be at competitive advantage.  As a result, you could be gaining new inquiries and additional sales simply because you have a killer domain name!

What is a domain name?

Real quick for the possible newbies that might be reading this: A domain name is the URL address of a website after the http://www.  In the example of http://bobbygreyhoundcool.com, bobbygreyhoundcool.com is the domain name.  One thing to keep in mind is that the domain name will pretty much become the name of the website unless you have a generic and keyword rich domain name for your unique company site.  For example, DelicousFrenchCroissants.com for a bakery named Joe Shoe's Bakery.

The Challenges of Choosing a Wrong Domain Name

Choosing the wrong domain could result in...

• Being stuck with a domain name that is not optimal for your business or one that you later do not like (especially as you learn more about internet business and having a website).
• Being at competitive disadvantage to your competitors who have better domain names
• Losing hard earned PageRank (more on it other posts) and links being lost should you decide to change your domain name
• Losing potential customers to your competitor because your customers mistype your website
• Your customers can't find your website

Benefits of Picking Picking the Right Domain Name for Your Business

Here are some reasons why you want to choose the right domain name from the beginning.  This is essentially everything that is just the opposite of what was just summarized in the previous paragraph:

1. Competitive advantage - easier for your customers to find your website
2. You do NOT have to worry about moving to another domain later
3. People can actually remember your website name/address
4. People can actually type in

So How Do You Choose the Right Domain Name?  Here Are Some Tips and Ideas.

• Incorporation of keywords - If you are in bathing soaps business and the keyword bathingsoaps.com is available, it would be silly not to take it.  A website that has the keywords right into its domain name is highly likely to appear in search results for those keywords.  Just imagine that someone is searching for "bathing soaps" or your business keywords on Google and finding your business website!  If the most critical keywords are not available, you should consider either the company or the brand name.
• A dotcom domain name extension - even if you have a .net domain, people will still type in .com.  As a general rule of thumb, you should always try to get the .com domain name.  However, if you have a great .net domain name, then you might be OK in going with a .net domain name if your target audience is in an English-speaking country and are well-versed with computers.  If you are targeting the tech and gadget savvy users, then you might be able to get really creative and to get away with a .us .me or or some other domain extension.  Also, another exception is if you are targeting a demographic that is in a specific country other than US.  Then, you can consider domain extensions such as .co.uk or .de.
• Easy to remember and to type - cool and catchy phrases are fine, but people should be able to remember AND to type it in correctly.  After all, it doesn't do anyone any good if you do all this marketing, and people just cannot remember how to spell your website name.
• Less than 20 characters long - your website name should really be shorter than 10 characters if at all possible.  However, in this day and age, this is not very likely to happen.  The top 20, 50, or even 100 domain name ideas that you have... will be taken already.  If your website name is easy to roll off the tong and easy to remember and to type, I think you can get away with a very long domain name.  However, you will probably need to have another domain for your email addresses, so that you do not get stuck with an email like this: myname@twentycharacterslong.com.  That's very long for people to type in... just to reach you.
• Make it easy for the end-user - think about who is going to be using your website.  Just imagine that very often the highest searched keywords for your website could actually be your website URL!  There still are people who search in Google the URL address of the website instead of just typing that into the address bar.

Some Commonly Asked Question(s) Regarding Domain Names

1. Q: Should I use a hyphen?
   1. A: Sure, why not!  If you have a great domain name that is keyword rich, this may be an option for you.  For example, if bathingsoaps.com is not available then bathing-soaps.com might be the next best option.  Traditionally the hyphens may have actually been preferred, but search engines nowadays can separate and read non-hyphen-separated words (ones that are stucktogether) pretty well.  And, make sure to think about the end-user.  Although we use hyphens in our domain, we actually prefer not to use hyphens wherever possible.
2. Any other questions?  This post ended up being much longer than anticipated, and I believe already answered many of the common questions.  However, if anyone has additional questions about domains, I will add it here.

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Good luck in picking out the right domain name!