all the wikis

If you are serious or enthusiastic about your presence on the web you will want your own domain names.

www.myveryowndomains.com

Choose domain names for a purpose

A good domain name:

• Improves your ranking in search engines
• Is easy for people to remember and use
• Reflects the content of your sites
• Supports existing brands
• Looks good in email addresses
• Makes you feel good

Not all of these characteristics are important to you and only you can prioritise them. Let’s take a look.

Can domain names improve your ranking with search engines?

Having keywords in domain names is one way of improving your search ranking. This needs to be used in combination with keywords in your meta-tags, titles and content.
Hyphenated domain names are said to have an advantage in this respect because they can contain two or three highly relevant keywords. What’s more there are plenty of hyphenated domain names still available. For example, when I last checked shoes-with-style.com was still available as was computer-recommendations.com and web-opinions.com

Do domain names need to be easy to remember?

Some domain names need to be easy to remember. Addresses you want to access from several computers, like search engine names, need to be quick and easy. But this might not be important for your site. A number of things make it less important for domain names to be memorable.

• People may always arrive on your site via a search engine or other link and never need to remember the name.
• Your site might be so important to people they bookmark it.
• Once people start to fill in the address bar of their browser with the first few letters of domain names the rest auto completes.

Need domain names reflect the content of your site?

Most domain names need to reflect the content of your site. The content is the reason people visit your site. In addition quite a few people ‘guess’ the names of web sites they need. For example if they are looking for exchange rates they might just type in exchangerates.com.

Domain names that do not reflect the content are harder to promote, unless you are google who managed to create a brand out of a whole new name.

Have you got an existing brand to support?

Existing big brands will want to do all they can to get their brand names as domain names. What would you think if you wrote the web address ibm.com and didn’t get IBM.

Would you be happy with it as your email address?

Many web hosting services will be provide you with free email through your domain name. It would be a shame to have an email address you are embarrassed to tell people.

Does it pass the telephone test?

If you are going to be advertising your website on the radio or telling people it over the telephone it must be able to pass the telephone test. The test is telling someone the website address over the telephone. A pass requires the person to be able to spell the address correctly. Warning, carrying out this test can be confusing and sometimes embarrassing as the following examples demonstrate.

• StarsExcite.com StarSexSite.com
• TreeFellers.com Threefellahs.com
• PoorKnights.com You can work it out!

There are lots of good domain name still available. Here are some things you need to know about domain names.

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