So you want to start up a website?  Strategic planning and long term vision will serve you best in your choice of domain names.  A well chosen domain is a key component to your website’s success. Good search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with domain name selection.  Not to mention your positioning and branding with your customer.

You have searched for your desired domain name and it turns out someone else has already snagged it.  Now what?  But you really wanted it badly.  Can the domain name still be acquired?  The answer is a qualified YES.  It’s possible, but there are some things to consider.  With some research and hard work you can possibly obtain the name from the current domain name owner.  But for now, lets look at some alternatives to getting that domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com.  Is hyphenating the best way to go?  Yes and no.  If you want a domain name that is already taken by someone else and is already a well known, well traveled website, this might be a bad move, because users already familiar with the original domain name will just type the original, non-hyphenated version into their web browser, and end up not at your site but at your competitor’s site.  Not a good strategy.  Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website.  Definitely shorter is better.  But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name.

Longer or Shorter?  You can purchase domain names up to 67 characters in length.  At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be.  Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser?  My website is www.StartMyWebsiteToday.com  and features a name that in a few words encapsulates the purpose of the site.  Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking.  In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name.  Shorter is better here.

Brand Name or Generic  Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name?  If your business is known by a brand name, and it is a well known name, of course it is the best possible strategy to try to register that domain name.  Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer.  But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website.  If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name.  But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well.  People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names.  A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike.  Research your domain name as thoroughly as you can, including looking for generic keywords which could be a good fit as a potential domain name.  You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better.   A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one.  To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine.