When you are choosing a domain name it’s important to keep in mind the best features of a domain name. Knowing what to look for in a domain name can drastically improve your ranking and website’s attraction to visitors.
1) Availability
While this may seem obvious its very important to have your domain name be available for sale. Typically this means that it can be purchased at any registrar such as GoDaddy.com
. However, it could also be that the domain is available from someone who has already purchased it. Just remember that if you are purchasing a domain from a second market, you will pay a hefty premium from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.
2) Keywords
One of the best ways to give your website an instant boost in traffic for a particular keyword is to use those keywords, as an exact match in your domain. For example, if you website was targeting the exact match keywords [underwater basket weaving] then you could get some instant relativity by choosing the domain underwaterbasketweaving.com. Note that this only works for exact match keywords, so you only get one shot. Use dashes to separate words if you need to.
3) Top Level Domain (aka TLD)
A TLD is the suffix of your domain such as .com or .org. Generally speaking .com and .org TLDs tend to get ranked higher on search engines and are more attractive to users. Other TLDs should be avoided for consumer facing sites.
4) Spelling
Despite some of the modern trends with shortened spellings or skipped vowels, for the broadest appeal to users and to match keywords naturally, pick a domain with your target language words spelled correctly.
5) Niche
Targeting a niche is important and having a domain name that represents expertise and knowledge in that niche will attract users and gain respect in your area.
6) Memorable
Your domain name should be easy for people to remember as this will be the first thing visitors see before going to your website.
7) Quality
In this context quality refers to the representation of your domain name to the contents you will be providing. Your domain name would be considered high quality if the words in your domain name accurately represent the information or products that you are offering on your website. This is important since not only will this be clearer for your users but search engines will also reward accurate associations and punish frauds. This means that if your domain is dog-houses-for-sale.com and your homepage is all about dog food, your quality is low.
