Darren Rowse has given us pretty good reasons to buy a personal domain name. He says:
Having your own domain name is desirable for many bloggers for numerous reasons. For a start if you’re wanting to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog a domain that reflects this can help. Similarly a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding of a product, service, business or even person. Domain purchases give the added bonus of email addresses with the same domain (adding to both professionalism and branding) and can enhance your Search Engine Ranking.
- Source
I spent a lot of time in choosing a domain name for my site.
Below I discuss some points that may help you in choosing a good domain name.
1) Google Adwords
Suppose you have a website about social media of whose domain name you wish to buy. Begin with Google Adwords. Type in some keywords and see how they are ranked there. Experiment with different words. Suppose you find “web media” to be the highest ranking keyword. Buy a domain name like www.webmedia.com. If it’s unavailable add some prefixes or suffixes to the keyword. Try for something like socialwebmedia.com or webmedianew.com.
A higher ranked Google Adword will bring a lot of traffic from Google.
2) Go for a dot com
More than 60,000 blogs are created per day! So it’s very difficult to find a domain name of your choice as most of them are already occupied. Therefore webhosts have started offering “.net”, “.org”, “.edu” etc. web suffixes.
Now people who have spent some time on the net would know about these things but people who are not that technologically advanced, automatically assume that a “dot com” domain name is all that exists.
Darren Rowse once said that he looses a lot of traffic because his domain name is problogger.net and not problogger.com. It was unavailable when he bought it.
So try your best for a “dot com” type domain name. It will help.
3) Don’t use numbers or special characters
A domain name is your address online. If you want people to find you make that easy.
Will you remember www.face-book.com more easily or www.facebook.com? People usually forget domain names that contain hyphens etc.
4) The short cut
For reasons discussed above in #3 your domain name must be short. Will you remember a domain name like susskindsblogphysicsforeveryone.blogspot.com/ ?
This by the way is the blog of an Ivy League professor!
I think he will get a lot more visits if he chooses a domain name like www.physics.com.
5) Use Ajax to know availability
Services like www.ajaxwhois.com and www.domjax.com provide excellent service in terms of domain name availability.
Just visit these sites, type in the name you wish to find and you’ll see immediate results.
Note – these sites are not for buying a domain name. These are only for knowing the availability of a domain name. Once you find a domain is available go to a registrar like HostGator to buy it.
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