What's in a name? Everything. A domain name is like the hanging sign over the door of a business, it must be clear concise and memorable.

Most of the traffic to a website is from search engines, so it's important to include the name of the business and a top keyword in the domain name. A business called Jack City used cars, could use a domain name like www.jackcitycars.com, were jack city is the name of the business and the keyword is cars. Sometimes, the chosen domain name is not available. In that case, adding a hyphen may work. For example, www.jack-city-cars.com or www.jackcity-cars.com. Using the hyphen is a double edged sword, A site will rank higher in the search engines, but people typing the name into their address bar will likely misspell it; ending up at a competitors site.

If the business is regional, a region specific top level domain name, such as .ca (Canada) .co.uk (United kingdom), may be a good choice. If a business is international, .com really is the best choice.

Trying to cut corners by hosting a site at a free hosting site is always a bad idea. Having a domain name like http://yoursite.freehostingsit e.com looks unprofessional. I mean really, what does it say about a business if it can't afford the 50 bucks a year it costs to get it's own exclusive domain name. Having an exclusive domain name will also give the owner a professional looking email address like yourname@yoursite.com. Using a Hotmail or Yahoo email address looks like a scam and will scare away customers.

If enough money is available, a business may want to consider buying variations and common misspellings of the domain name. This is a fairly inexpensive way to boost traffic to the website.

As can be seen, a domain name is very important and should be chosen with care. Changing it in the future will cost a business vast amounts of it's hard earned traffic.

Learn more about this author, Kevin Millard.
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