Choosing Your Domain Name

Recently I've been involved in a very lengthy discussion on how to choose the best URL for your website. This may seem like a very top-down kind of thing, and sometimes people are inclined to skip over it, but it can make a big difference for search and traffic.

The first website I conducted SEO for was called educationstationteachers.com, belonging to a company called The Education Station. It was a horrible choice. It's long, hard to remember, hard to see -- that is, it's difficult to look at it and grasp instantly what it says -- and impossible to guess.

I don't know why the owners chose this name. If you're choosing a URL, let's make sure that you don't make the same mistakes.

• Find out what's available. My favorite place to look is Psychic Whois, where you can type in the beginning of a possible name and get a list of available options. Your first choice will naturally be YourBusiness.com if you're a business or YourOrganization.org if you're a nonprofit, and Psychic Whois will tell you whether you can have that URL.
• Think about the top-level domain. That is, will you end your domain name with .com, .org, .biz, .net? If you make money from your website or from the company your website represents, then you need the .com ending. This is what people will guess and type in.
  
• First try to be guessable. If at all possible, use the address that people will be most likely to guess and type in. For The Education Station, it would have been educationstation.com. Ask people what they think your web address would be. Make them guess. Tally the answers and go with the most popular one.
• Then, try to be memorable. Onsharp, a Fargo web design firm, uses onsharp.com, which is exactly what you'd guess. You won't forget it, either. They have a very high proportion of direct traffic, because it's just as easy to type it right in as to search for it -- or even to bookmark it.
• At least, be predictable. One of the participants in the conversation I mentioned proposed www.signoooorama.com for a business called Sign-a-Rama. While there is a whimsy and coolness to that name, using the "O" instead of the "A" which the business uses, combined with the difficulty of getting the right number of "O"s typed in, makes this a bad choice. Your URL needs to have an obvious connection with your business. It can't just be evocative. You goal is to get visitors there.
  
• Use your keywords. All things being equal, Google gives higher placement to sites with the keyword in the URL. The name of your business certainly ought to be a major keyword for you. If for some reason you can't get signarama.com, you may be better off with signsYourTown.com than with some variant on Sign-a-Rama.
• If all else fails, be short. Among the many problems with educationstationteachers.com was the length. Even people who found it easy to learn and remember wouldn't care to type it in. "Bookmark it!" we'd say cheerfully, and that's good advice, but it's better to have a convenient URL in the first place. Not shorter than your actual business name (see "Be guessable" above), but no longer if you can avoid it.

If I couldn't get MyBusiness.com as my domain name, I'd think seriously of changing my business name.