Choosing a Domain Name for Your Business

This paper explains how to choose a correct domain name for your business.

If you decided on a .com address then you can skip the following section and go straight to "Your Domain Name".

Country-specific TLDs

If you will be using a country-specific TLD then you need to understand the system a little more.

The country-specific TLDs are issued by organisations local to each country. This means that there is local control over these Second Level Domains (2LDs) and thus they are all different.

Some countries have a second breakdown within their addresses, eg:

• in Australia, domain names take the form of joescompany.com.au,



• Canada simply uses the TLD, and thus if joe were based in Canada he would use joescompany.ca,



• yet another set of countries use .co.xx - eg. if Joe operated in Britain, his domain name would take the following form: joescompany.co.uk.

Look for what is used in your country.

Your Domain Name

Having decided the domain name type, we can now move on to the beginning of the domain name: what your own site will be called.

To decide the beginning of your domain name, firstly, look at your company name - this is your main candidate for creating your domain name.

So Joe's Fish Shop in Australia would ideally use JoesFishShop.com.au

(where au is the TLD for the country where Joe lives - I am assuming that a fish shop is a local business!)

Company names make the best domain names, but there are times when we don't want the whole thing, for instance Joe's Fish Shop and Seafood Eat-in Cafe, as JoesFishShopAndSeafoodEatInCafe.com.au is too long to be practical.

Here, Joe would be adviced to stick with JoesFishShop.com.au

What to include

Domain names may only include letters, numbers and hyphens ('-'), so no apostrophes or exclamation marks. In addition, the first character must be a letter.

In choosing your name, avoid hyphens. Sometimes it can be difficult to find a name that isn't taken without hyphenating, but try to avoid it. There are several reasons for this:

• some of the search engines don't like hyphens, so the more you have, the less likely you are to appear in the top results.



• customers have trouble remembering hyphenated domain names, and we want people to be able to reach our site.



• hyphenated domain names are terrible to tell people out loud.

If you are concerned by the readability of your domain name without hyphens, use capitalisation, as I did for the JoesFishShop example above.

When you go to buy your domain name, you may find it is already taken. Don't get too attached to one form until you've actually purchased it, have a short list of variants that you could live with.

Product Lines

You might feel that a domain that reflects a major product line would suit you better. This is fine to do, but I would suggest that you buy a domain name that relates to your actual business as well, even if you only use it for email.

Generally, keep alternate domain names to use for marketing in specific ways, and your company's prime domain should reflect your permanent company name.

Conclusion

We've chosen both the beginning and the ending of our name. Now, put them together, and thats the whole thing!

Choosing your domain name is only the beginning, of course, once you've picked your domain name you have to find a registrar from whom to buy it and then you have to have it hosted and then comes the biggest job of all - building your website! But its one step on the journey to a successful and profitable internet presence for your company!

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