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Why a short readable domain name is important

So you've got a great idea for a new website in an great niche, and it's time to register a domain name. Before you hit the buy button, I have a few tips to help you find a solid domain name.

Short and sweet. You should try to keep your domain name as short as possible because people don't like typing more than they have to. It's also easier to remember short domain names rather than long ones. A good example of this would be Microsoft using msn.com instead of microsoftnetwork.com.

Use whole words. I learned the hard way that creating a new brand name is harder than it seems. Some people have been successful doing this online (Flickr, Twitter, Plurk) but unless you get a huge user base, people won't remember your strange website name. This works even less for blogs (as opposed to web applications) because people will judge your website based on the domain name, and if it's not what they're looking for they'll leave. Even if you had the information they wanted!

Describe your website. Going back to the Flickr example, if you just heard about that website you wouldn't quite know what to expect, and the same goes for search engines. So if you were starting a blog about drunk driving and DUI's, you wouldn't want some obscure domain name. You would want one that directly describes what you'll be talking about, like ColoradoDUI.com or if you were writing about local DUI laws you could do ColoradoDUILaws.com. Short, whole words that describe your website perfectly.

Make it brandable. Your domain name should also be catchy and very easy to remember. Taking the DUI example from before, would you rather ask somebody to remember ColoradoDUILaws.com or TheBiggestListOfColoradoDUIInformation.com? If you have the main niche keywords in your domain name, people will remember it.

Search engines love whole-word domain names too. If I was trying to get indexed with the keywords “Colorado DUI” and “DUI Laws” and I registered ColoradoDUILaws.com, search engines would give me more authority for those keywords simply because they're in my domain name. If I had the same information on the domain DrinkingInformation.com, you wouldn't get indexed as fast, or as high for those keywords.

I've spent enough money and time on different domain names to find out if search engines really care about your domain name, and I can tell you they do. So keep these things in mind next time you're thinking of starting a new website.

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