So you want to start up a website?  Strategic planning and long term vision will serve you best in your choice of domain names.  Just as important as choosing the name for your business, a domain name, the name of your soon-to-be website, is one of the most important factors in your online success. Good search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with domain name selection.  Not to mention your positioning and branding with your customer.

OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it.  But you really wanted it badly.  Can the domain name still be acquired?  It’s Possible.  It’s possible, but there are some things to consider.  However, with a little luck and enginuity you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for.  Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies to get the domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names If the domain name you want is already taken, consider hyphenating it, as in taking billsplumbingsupplies.com and making it bills-plumbing-supplies.com.  Is it always the best strategy?  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.  Word to the wise: keep the domain name as short as possible.  The longer the name, especially with dashes in between words, the more likely that potential visitors to your site will enter it incorrectly into their browsers, thus foiling the chances of them visiting your website and costing you customers!  Definitely shorter is better.  Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up.  After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic.  In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy.

Longer or Shorter?  If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name.  You could purchase a domain name like thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com which is 63 characters long, but why would you want to do that?  Who would want to type it into a 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.  When choosing your domain name try to keep it short and concise, and if at all possible let the name tell the story of the site.  Keep it as short as possible.

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.  For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes.  Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there.  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.