The only time you feel that you would have born earlier is while choosing domain name for your upcoming dream website. Every beautiful domain name you think is already booked. And amazingly, they all are not website, but a parked page full of ads waiting for some foolish buyer with lot of cash to burn.
How much contribution of Domain Name lies in success of Website
Clearly, more than any one expects. Easier to remember domain names fetch more success than a difficult domain name website having the same usefulness. Its proven and seen by industry experts.
Websites are Not KFC and MacDonald situated on the same side of road and you choose one of them from the two depending upon the brand value, taste and past experience and even the distance from your car’s stopping point. Websites are sites visited by Lazy people sitting in front of computer, thinking for recharging their mobile phone having 100 options equally good together, but typing the one which he remembers first.
There Are 4 Kind of Popular Websites
Case1# Websites having Domain name as One Meaningful word – Like About.com , Go.com, Answer.com , Confused.com or Booking.com. But you should be the luckiest Guy born on planet to grab a meaningful one word domain name. I guess all one word domain names are taken. You can try new domain name extensions like .xyz or .io but you will loose domain name traffic of the people who will think you are on a .com one and they will put it directly on address bar or will do CTRL+Enter after writing your domain name in the address bar.
Try shortdomainsearch.com for finding single word domains easily
Case2# Websites having Domain Names as combination of Two meaningful words – Like Facebook, PayPal, DropBox, DailyMotion, Youtube, Wikipedia, Tripadvisor etc. This section is the most densely populated and most popular option among entrepreneurs. There are around 0.4 million words in English. The domain names of these words are all booked i guess.But if you do a combination of these meaningful words. There will be a total of 4 ,00,000 * 4,00,000 words = 16 Billion options.
Try impossibility.org for searching this category of domain names.
Case3# Websites having domain names after slightly altering one or two letters of Popular words – Like Flickr, Quora, pinterest, Twitter, Flirchi etc. You just change the popular word a bit in a way that it remains phonic in sound as well as easy to remember.
Try Naminum.com for choosing this kind of domains.
Case4# Websites having Interesting meaningless names – Like Google, Zynga, Vimeo, Taboola, omegle, skype etc. These are the ones which will be very easily available, but you have to be very creative and will have to stretch your gray cells for finding them. Initially these unheard names hinders the popularity factor, but once website starts growing, this uniqueness in domain name make them stand away from the crowd and it boost the brand image like anything.
Try wordoid.com for finding this category of domain names easily.
Now , Leave this apart, Talking about why a Domain Name become popular ( Leaving aside website’s usefulness which is the most important factor).
Domain Name Length
The first and foremost is shortness of the domain name. People are lazy first. For equal usefulness, they will always choose what strains their fingers least.
But shorter domain name does not mean that you should Choose xtr55t.com as it may be short but who will remember it. It should be easy to remember also.
Here is a pie chart of Top 1 million domain names. Clearly the largest section of webmasters have chosen domain name ranging from 6 to 10 characters. So clearly, if your domain name is from 6 to 10 characters, you have chosen the most chosen path.
It should be easy to remember
Domain name should be easy to remember. If they are requiring a little stress in remembering for a few seconds , people will start typing domain names of websites having similar capability. Now suppose you have played flash games on kongregate and miniclips. But in spare time if you are planning to play flash game to kill time, you would definitely type miniclips on address bar, as you remember it first.
Please don’t choose separator or number in between
Many People choose – sepeartor or a digit between domain names. This kills the speed of typing domain name on addrress bar. Also , if you tell your best friend about the website , you will find it difficult in explaining it and there may be a chance that you may get confused. Now suppose you told your friend about a cool ringtone download website having domain name as ringtone-finder or rington2find then you will have to explain him that there is a hyphen (-) in between or its 2 and not two.
Is Your target is get an early traffic Boost from Google
Now you may be thinking, what kind of a question is that. Everyone on earth wants a free lunch from Google. I agree. And i also know that inclusion of top keywords in domain name helps google to relate early that what the website is all about. But if you are planning to go for a long term strategy, it doesn’t matter much. Although, it may happen that inclusion of top keywords destroy the beauty of your domain name.
Now, how will you feel that zilliow.com becomes realestateamerica.com or facebook becomes makefriends.com or google.com becomes searchengine.com or amazone.com becomes shoponline.com It looks boring and mundane , although seo friendly. This kills the brand.
Once the website grows, these things doesn’t matter much as google picks you up in ranking leaving every other factor.
For example everyone knows that having a country specific tld matters much in initial boost of seo traffic, but in the long run it doesn’t matter much.
Although if you are planning to book a domain name for a small niche and your primary target is to leverage Google search traffic, then go ahead and book the perfect keyword combination targeting your specific country tld.
Like sites likehappynewyear2015wallpaper.com which are booked only for january 2015 month and domain booker earned $10,000+ in just one month and he doesn’t care what happens after that. Below is the alexa Graph of the website.
So, Keeping these things in mind, you can go ahead and Book your domain name , depending upon your need and its beauty. Try a Short, Catchy and easy to remember domain name. If you are a bit confused about your domain name, you can ask me in comments section, i have wasted half of my life picking domain names at Godaddy.
Some websites to help you choose best domain name
- Domainr – Blazing fast domain name search. Auto suggest feature here turns available options of your domain name into green. No need to spend zillions of hours for choosing your domain name.]
- impossibility.org – for searching domain name with combination of two words fast.
- shortdomainsearch – for finding shortest domain names available.
- Wordoid – For finding domain name of made up words.
- Naminum – for finding domain names with your desired word and slight alteration