Choosing The Right Domain Name For Your Business

Choosing the right domain name is important, even critical, in positioning and branding your website. So what are the considerations for an Irish business?

Dot what?

.com is still the king of the castle when it comes to generic top level domains (TLDs). .com is the TLD your dad will remember. Highly memorable, inexpensive and easy to register. Sometimes tough to find the right one. Second to .com is .net – still fairly memorable, inexpensive, and easy to register. Third, recommended for charities and non-profits is .org.

Go local – and establish trust

Despite the comparative difficulty of applying for a .ie it is often worthwhile. The local domain establishes trust by making it clear to your audience where you are based. Many people are also familiar with the lower cost of .com – making the slightly bigger investment in .ie could help differentiate you from fly-by-night operators. If you want to expand further afield, registering a .co.uk is inexpensive and allows you to further localise – for example your ecommerce site could have euro and pounds sterling versions… and perhaps you could register for a London-based virtual office to support the latter!

Branding vs Keywords

Your domain should be memorable, short, easy to spell correctly first time and unique. So should you go for a descriptive keyword or brand?

Descriptive keyword domains like pets.com, diy.com, jobs.com are valuable for 2 reasons: type-in traffic and anchor text. Type-in traffic is just what it sounds like – Monster get a lot of business from people typing jobs.com straight into their browser. It’s common for single keyword domains to get thousands of hits per day from this kind of traffic – which is why they’re highly sought after and very expensive.

Anchor text is the text that is used in a link in html, e.g. this is anchor text. Anchor text is a big deal because Google and other search engines weight the text used in these links as very important. So if you have ladies-golf-equipment.ie and that’s linked to with “Ladies Golf Equipment Ireland Ltd” then that’s receiving more google juice for the search term “ladies golf equipment ireland” than e.g. golfglam.ie with a link of “Golf Glam Ireland Ltd“.

The advantage of a brandname, however, is about differentiation and how memorable your domain can be. Amazon, Monster, Google – none of these are descriptive keywords – but they’re all strong brands, easy to spell, sort and unique. golfglam.ie is a good example of a brand domain name: it’s memorable and creates a picture with two short words.

Phonetics and spelling

One example of a requirement that I had when choosing a domain name for my business was a fairly obvious but simple one:

It must be possible for a radio listener or person on the end of a telephone to be able to spell the domain name correctly after hearing it said normally one time only — without spelling it out!

LogOn.ie fits this requirement pretty well. I recommend this approach to every business when at all possible.

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate…

In general, hyphens are bad. Stay away from them in domain names unless you really know what you’re doing. Unhyphenated names are easier to spell and read aloud and communicate to others.

On the flip side, hyphens can add legibility and are reported to have a higher weighting for the keywords with google because they can distinguish between the words: it’s clear to Google what ladies-golf-equipment.ie sells, but they don’t know what a golfglam is!

Maybe some of these guys might have considered using hyphens!

• PowerGenItalia.com
• PenIsland.net
• TherapistFinder.com!
• ExpertsExchange.com

Useful resources

Here’s some further reading and some great tools to experiment with!

• Article: Choosing a domain
• Article: Keyword & Descriptive Domains for SEO
• Article: Are Hyphenated Domain Names A Good Buy?
• Article: How to name a web based business
• Tool: Nameboy
• Tool: Domain Tools

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