When you first decide to build a website for your business, the first natural thought is naming your website yourbusiness.com. Naming your web address after your business is not always the ideal way to go. When choosing a name for your website, some of the major considerations is:
Let's pretend we have a business A & B's Accounting Emporium which is a business that specializes in providing accounting services to small businesses. When building a website for your business, you are making a major investment in the future marketing efforts of your business. In most cases, you will take full advantage of this investment and use it for internet marketing purposes; mainly to attract new customers. However, there are other reasons organizations build websites such as keeping in touch with existing customers, provide information only, or simply as an electronic brochure. In most cases, you will be using your website for all of these purposes. In that case, when first choosing your domain name, think from an internet marketing strategic mindset. Develop an internet marketing plan or strategy first and use your domain name as a major tool of this strategy. However, if internet marketing is not your purpose, then by all means name your site after your business, for ex. www.aandbsaccountingemporium.com (LOL).
This leads to our next point. Find a name that is easy to remember and easy to spell. A & B's Accounting Emporium would have many customers that would not easily remember their business name (let alone web address). Everyone is not well-versed in spelling words like emporium. My suggestion would be to limit your domain name to no more than 3 words or less. It is more important to display the type of business you have or your specialty or product type than your actual business name (unless your business is WELL known like McDonalds.com
Also, in choosing your domain name, you have the choice of .com, .net, .org, .biz, .tv, .info, etc. The most widely used of the suffixes would be .com and therefore it is the easiest suffix to remember. If you decide to name your business website "accounting.biz" for example. Someone may not remember the .biz part and assume the suffix is .com. You have just advertised and directed your potential customer to one of your competitors at worst case scenario or just never attained that new customer at best. Each of these suffixes traditionally had meaning and certain types of businesses choose them (sometimes today that holds true but not necessarily.)
If your product or business is related to the suffix it would be an ideal choice versus using the traditional .com suffix.
When creating your website, you will use keywords. Keywords are words that a potential customer may type in to find the product or service you are offering. With our fictitious business, a potential customer may type in "accounting firm" or "business accounting firm" or "small business accounting" etc into a search engine like Google. A search engine would pull up all of the websites relevant to these terms the potential customer typed in. The search engine would rank its findings by the information that is most relevant to that subject. Search engines use keywords to do this. Using a keyword in the domain name is weighed more heavily as relevant than a keyword that is just in the content. This fact alone would give you a competitive edge.
In applying all of the points above, you can see www.aandbsaccountingemporium.com is not a good choice in naming their website. However, a better domain name for our fictitious company would be www.smallbizaccounting.com This name may or may not be available. If not, simply find a variation of the name. When coming up with a variation, do not alter the spelling because no one will search for a misspelled keyword. You may use SmallBizAccountingFirm or SmallBizAccountingOnline but in keeping with our rules it may be BusinessAccountingFirm or BusinessAccountingOnline or SBAccounting. Just remember to keep it simple!
Camille Dykes, MBA is Chief Consultant and Designer for Dykes' Webshop. She has over ten years' experience in web design and business development. Ms. Dykes seeks to give her clients quality websites that attract new customers. Make your website attract more customers with great web design Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Camille_Dykes |
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