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In business, a domain name is a powerful tool used to connect with customers. It's part of your brand identity, and it can influence the graphic design of your site. Overall, it's a very important and often overlooked part of a business' online presence.

For those of you completely new to the online world, I'll start at the beginning. Technically speaking, a domain name is the address that people will use to find your site. For example, www.yoursite.com, mysite.org, and www.domain-name.com are examples of domain names. Those aren't meant to be real examples of anything, but rather an introduction to the format of domain names. They can be long, short, contain hyphens, letters, numbers, and such. I'm not going to go into all the technical details here. Just know that when you type a domain name into a web browser's address bar, you will be taken to that domain's web site.

For a business, a great domain name is important. For most businesses, it is best to have a domain name that is descriptive of your business and it's purpose. However, one does not need to throw the whole mission statement into a web address. Instead, the domain name should be short and memorable. A balance needs to be struck between short and sweet and enough description so the average web surfer will at least have an idea of what the site might be about.

As a communication tool, a domain name is powerful. If a business can come up with a name that just about rolls off the tongue, is highly memorable, and takes users to a great site, word of mouth marketing will just take it's natural progression. That's what happened with Google. All the tech types started using it for their web searches, and then it spread out from there to the rest of the population. The domain name is one simple, memorable word, and the site did one simple thing. And it did a great job at it. That name communicated a simple, quality service to users, and as a result, those users became Google's first marketing team. A great domain name on top of a great site can do that for a business.

Domain names are more than just an address. They are marketing tools, branding utilities, and a customer service interface. Choose a domain name that speaks to customers, describes a business, and is as concise as possible.

Learn more about this author, Caleb Rogers.
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