Some basic rules to follow when choosing your perfect domain name
1.- Try to choose a short domain name. 6 to 8 characters long is very good, between 8 and 12 is good. More than 12 is poor.
2.- For now, try to stick to the traditional top level domains extensions (Dot Com, Net, Biz, Org, Info)
3.- Try to avoid numbers and dashes as part of your domain name (makes a name quite difficult to remember and type in) and they tend to perform poorly on search engines.
4.- If you find a name that is available but the Dot Com , the Dot Net or the Dot Org are already registered check if the name is not a copyright. Avoid future claims.
5.- If you are registering your Company name, that's fine, you know what you need. You may consider even a Dot Co in this case (as stated above, avoid the Copyright issues)
6.- But if you are registering a name to run an online store, consider to choose a name that includes at least one word that is related to your business. This will increase your chances of getting found on search engines. You can even look after an exact match domain name if it is not too long.
7.- Before you go and register straight away, you may want to check if the name itself has some value. You can get a valuation of domain names that are yet not registered (you can learn more about free valuation tools in our Blog). They use a criteria based upon the internet searches for your domain name as a search argument.
8.- Regarding Country Code Top Level Domains, they are good if its use is popular in your Country, but make sure you can be able to get at least the Dot Com.
9.- If you find a very good Dot Com, it would be wise to register the other Top Dots (net, biz, org, info, etc.). most of the Domain Registrars have very good bundle offers available.
10.- Then it's up to you: you content is gold. If your website/blog/store are cool, then you will get all the traffic you expect.
Choosing a name for your online store
Every idea must have a name first. Before going live with your Online Store or Discount Store you should take special attention to the domain name name that you plan to use and make sure that it will be easy to spell and easy to remember by your audience.
A domain name can have up to 253 alphanumeric characters (hyphens - are also accepted), but you shouldn't use a domain name longer than 12/15 characters to make your store a search engines friendly website.
So for a successful launch, your domain name choice should be good enough to tell it all about your business in just less than 15 characters. Then you have 50 to 70 characters to put a title to your store and between 120 to 150 characters to make a detailed description of your business in your description meta tag.
Don't repeat words in your Store title and in your description otherwise you can get search penalties for word spamming and you may not get listed on top of search results. At a maximum use one singular and one plural of the same word, but no more.
Don't repeat the domain name that you are planning to use in your title and description. Same as previous paragraph, may be considered word spamming.
The brains behind search engines are getting so paranoid with fresh contents and duplicate content penalties, that in many search instances they are no longer considering your description and your keywords meta tags, they go and look straight into your website contents to map your site. So you may launch your website without using these popular meta tags and wait till you get listed on search engines to see what shows up as a description of your website. Then you can include a description meta tag if you don't like what search engines are telling about your online store.
Of course a dot com domain name extension should be your primary choice. As you probably know over one thousand new domain extensions are in the process of being launched during this year and 2015, but dot com's are still the internet kings and are still considered a safer option to launch a new website. If you are still interested in one of the new domain extensions (new GTLD's) avoid cyber squatting on someone else's traditional GTLD, this can bring you unexpected copyright issues.
Choosing and hand registering a brand new .com domain name shorter than 10/15 characters that really tells it all about your business can be a real challenge, but it's worth the effort. It's all about money: a new dot com has a yearly fee of around USD10 per year (list price). Instead if you opt yo buy a preregistered .com you should be prepared to make an investment of hundreds or thousands. In a previous post we talked and displayed a couple of great tools that can help you find unregistered dot com domain names.
When searching for a new dot com, you can see suggestions of alternative names that use hyphens and/or numbers embedded within the domain name, and this may sound as a good choice, but please don't forget your customers: will they remember how to type in a domain name such as this example: my-2-offers-4-u.com? Definitely not. So keep searching.
One last advice: consider using at least one word in your domain name that is directly related to your online store: i.e. if you are selling web hosting services, try to include the word host or hosting in the domain name of your choice. This is called an exact match domain name, because your future customers looking for such a service will probably use one of these words as their search arguments. Make sure you are not using a copyrighted or trademarked word or part of a brand, simple words may be already copyrighted. Take a look into TESS (The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) and search for the term or word of your choice. If not trademarked or a request was rejected then you can use it.
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