Top Five Tips For Choosing An Effective Domain Name For Your Website

Choosing a domain name is something that should not and can not be rushed. As time goes on, websites and domain names build up history which helps with search engine ranking placements, or SERPs. So, you need to stick with the domain name you choose to get the most from this and therefore its vital you spend time making sure your decision is the correct, and below we look at the top five most important things we feel you should take into account before purchasing your url

Name Relationship – Your domain name or url should really reflect your company name if possible. For example, Clear Web Services domain name is www.clearwebservices.com, www.clearwebservices.net , www.clearwebservices.org, www.clearwebservices.co.uk, etc  because the relationship with our company branding and our website needs to be connected. Although we can register other domains names to capture traffic, which we discuss below, it is still vital that our company name is also our domain name, as this is what the majority of the public will expect when trying to find our company on the Internet.

Target Audience – If you are aiming for a UK audience, you really do need to go for a .co.uk address, but if you are looking to attract a global audience or give the impression of an international company, it is worth going for a .com, as although this used to be considered only for USA companies, it is now really the international standard domain name across the internet. If you are searching from the UK, most search engines will always try to deliver local results to you, as they consider these to be most relevant.

Indexing And Ranking – Although unproved and really just what we see on an everyday basis, local domains like .co.uk and .com tend to rank much better than domains like .info and org.uk for example. If you do a search for anything in Google, the likelihood that the majority of the first two pages of results are .co.uk and .com, with other domains only ranking if there is little competition. As mentioned, this is unproven and only mentioned from experience, but many web designers and SEO experts will also mention when advising on registering a domain name.

Keywords In URL – From a search engine optimisation point of view, trying to get a couple of keywords into your URL or domain name is always a brilliant idea, as long as you make it look natural and still make it a good domain name for your business. For example, if you sold washing machines in Bristol, a great domain would be www.washingmachinesbristol.co.uk, www.washingmachinesbristol.com, or www.washingmachinesbristol.net as people would most likely to search "washing machines in Bristol" if they are wanting to buy one from an independent dealer. Do not go over board and simply stack your url full of keywords trying to take advantage of Google, as this will only harm you in the long run, both naturally and from people not being able to remember your url!

Simple To Remember – If your domain name is going to be all over your advertising, including things like your company vehicles, t-shirts, uniforms and even media advertising like TV and Radio, then having a massively long and hard to remember URL is going to be a big mistake. You need to try and make sure your domain is easy to remember and contains no words that could be spelt incorrectly if misheard or only quickly visualised as your car flies by.