Three Things that make a Good Domain Name

There are three main points I take into consideration and they are listed below. Once you have an understanding of all three, you can decide which are most important for your business, and make a properly informed choice.

This should be a carefully considered decision, because changing your domain name at a later date is really not something you want to be doing.

The three points to consider when choosing your domain name

These are not in order of importance

1. A name that identifies your business (or your brand)
2. A name that is easy to read, easy to say and easy to type
3. A name that contains useful keywords

To start, let's look at each of these separately.

1. A domain name that identifies your business (or your brand)

The domain name www.bobsmithmotors.co.uk is clearly more personal than www.garagecroydon.co.uk - and anything that is personal helps you stand out. Having said that, if the business trades under the name 'Croydon Garage Ltd' then www.croydongarageltd.co.uk is still personal to the business.

It's important to remember however that the domain name does not have to be the business' name; in fact if your business has a common name then it's very likely that this will already have been registered by someone else.

2. A name that is easy to say, easy to type, and easy to read

Is it a tongue-twister to give out over the phone?
Does it take two minutes to type into a browser?
Is it a jumble of letters?
Remember: the shorter it is, the quicker and easier it is to use.

3. A domain name that contains useful keywords

The single biggest ranking factor in Google is text in links, and this is easily demonstrated by Googling the term "click here". As I write this, out of 1 billion results, only two of the top ten pages even mention the words 'click' or 'here'. The number one result for years has been Adobe's PDF reader download page, because it has millions of links pointing to it that say something like "to download the Adobe reader click here".

To get a site to rank well in Google for just about anything worth being found for, you need links to it that say what the site does. Many (or most) of the links that a website gets will be on its name, so if your domain name contains keywords related to your business then you are making it easier for your site to get keyword-rich links and rank well.

To find your business' keywords, just ask yourself...

What does your business do?
You need to come up with a word or two describing this. For trades and professions this is easy ('builder' and 'solicitor' speak for themselves), and services like 'catering' are also obvious.

It gets trickier if the business offers a diverse range of services or products. Here a bit of brain-storming will give you a few catch-all terms that could sum up the business. You can use Google's Keyword Tool to see which of these get used the most.

What area does it cover?
The most important thing here is to plan ahead. Buy the domain name you want to be using in 5 years' time; one you won't grow out of because you cover a whole county instead of one town, or a whole region instead of one county.

Of course, if your business trades on the fact that it provides something from a certain area then it could be important to have this in the domain name.

Bringing it together

Now we've looked at the three separately, let's consider them together. Your choice of domain should always satisfy points 1 and 2. In most cases I'd recommend that point 3 is also satisfied, but not always.

If the market the business is entering is saturated online, then - although a keyword domain looks tempting - an individual, identifiable brand might make you stand out amongst the thousands of keyword domains.

If very few people currently search for what the business offers, then there are no keywords to use. Creating a brand is very important here. The business has to create awareness of what it provides, and make sure that people associate the new product or service with the business' brand.

Putting it into practice

By now you should have an idea about possible domain names; now it's time to check that they are available. The registry for domain names ending in .uk is Nominet and you can check for available names using their WHOIS on the right hand side of the page.

next: Small Business Domain Name FAQs