Website Design & Marketing

Choosing the Right Domain Name
Posted in Industry News, Online Marketing on July 28th, 2009 by Rusty

When it comes down to your identity online many people often choose the wrong naming structure for their brand or identity online. The combination of strategy, imagination and good linguistic design practice. Not everyone has this ability and should definitely take this into consideration any time they wish to promote their business or brand online.

There are a few questions before you decide your domain name:

The first question is easy: Are you willing and able to spend lots of money on your domain name? If not, you can forget about a .com domain that’s a single real word, like Twitter.com or Amazon.com. They’re all registered, many by domain speculators, and buying one will cost a lot. You’ll need to look for a different kind of name. Real words on .net and .org domains are pretty hard to come by, too.

The other question is a strategic one and takes more thought: How do you plan to get traffic to your website? Answering this question can help you avoid a lot of confusion about what makes for a good name. Some views on this issue directly contradict others. For example, Rob Monster, CEO of Monster Venture Partners, believes that Google.com and Yahoo.com are “lousy domain names” and that podcast.com and slideshow.com are great ones. Marketing guru Seth Godin advises against real words like these and in favor of unique made-up names like Squidoo.com (his company).

Now should you have your domain name in mind…

How about some Fun Facts!

1. All 3 letter possibilities are gone on .com
2. All 4 letter words are depleted on .com
3. The most popular registered domain name length is 11 characters
4. There are 255,000+ domain names that are 32 characters or longer
5. All of the top 10,000 family names are registered as a domain name
6. The most common letter to start a domain with is S
7. More than 270,000 domains contain the sequence SEX

So now you know the facts, let’s think about choosing your name. This isn’t rocket science and you probably know you want your business or brand name in it somewhere. Don’t forget services or products you sell, they also make great domain names as people search for you online. If you domain name is already taken and not for sale then we have to think about alternatives to help you benefit in either branding yourself online or easy to remember phrases.

Let’s jump into some linguistics. FUN!

• Compound
  Example: YouTube
  Two whole words, often two nouns, stuck together. Don’t let anyone tell you that this kind of name is a “fad” and will go away. This has been the most common way to coin new English words as well as to create new names, and that’s unlikely to change in the next few hundred years.
• Phrase
  Example: Six Apart
  Words put together according to normal grammatical rules. Phrase names can be similar to compounds, but have a different pattern of syllabic emphasis. In compounds, the emphasis goes on the first word, the way we emphasize “white” in “the Whitehouse.” In phrases, the emphasis often goes on the second word, the way we emphasize “house” in “a white house.”
• Blend
  Examples: Microsoft, Farecast
  A blend combines a part of a word with another word or word part. The name Microsoft combines the “micro” part of “microcomputer” with the “soft” part of “software.” When blends involve a surprising overlap in sound between the two words, they’re a form of wordplay. Farecast is like that. It combines the words “fare” and “forecast,” and “fare” resembles the first syllable of “forecast.” When you create this kind of blend, be sure to avoid awkwordplay: don’t pile up consonants in ugly ways (like in the name Syncplicity), and don’t use important words to replace syllables that aren’t emphasized (the way the names Mapufacture and Carticipate do).
• Tweaked word
  Examples: Flickr, Zune
  Sometimes you can find a good domain name that’s basically a real word, but changed in some small way. It might have a modified spelling, like Flickr, or it might have a changed or added sound, like Zune (from “tune”) and iPhone.
• Affixed word
  Example: Friendster
  Some names are new words created by sticking a prefix or suffix onto an existing word. Friendster, for example, is “friend” with the suffix -ster attached. Biznik is “biz” with the Yiddish-derived suffix -nik (as in “beatnik”).
• Made-up name
  Examples: Etsy, Odeo
  Sometimes you can find a name that is, or seems to be, completely made up. For example, Etsy is an online hand-made goods marketplace, and Odeo is an online music website.

So we’ve figured out when building a name out of pieces, be sure that both pieces contribute something interesting. The name WidgetThing fails in this respect. LiftPort, the name of a company that wants to build an elevator to outer space, is not much better. The words “lift” and “port” have very similar meanings; both relate to moving things around. Neither relates to what makes this company really exciting, outer space.

Some great resources to find words is Visual Dictionary or Visual Thesaurus both of these resources should show you visually what would be a good match of words.

With all this understood, you found the words your looking to go with, now one last thing to think about is online advertising and how designing your domain name for SEO Ranking is important. For most search engines, having the same search term in the domain name, title, and meta tags will rank better than those with limited relevant words.

I hope this article was informative for when you choose to purchase a domain name. If you would like to purcahse a new domain for $10.99 let us help you. Click Here

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Industry News, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.