Domain name in general is a way to mask the IP address of server on which website your is hosted. Although they are just made up of few letters and words, they are considered as a very important part for any website’s success. In fact, in 2019, voice.com domain was sold for a staggering 30 million dollars!
It is therefore important to select domain name for your website with care. In today’s article, we will provide you tips and tools which you can use in order to select right domain for your website. Before starting with the tips, let us first understand the importance of domain.
Importance of domain name
In any domain name, there are 2 important parts namely main domain name and domain extension. Taking our domain as example, in our domain, ‘smartchoicedomains’ is the main name part of domain. For most of the people, this is the name they will remember and refer to others. Due to this reason, it plays very important role to expand our audience and overall improve your conversion. This name is also used by search engines like google, bing etc to pitch your website to audience and study has shown that if website name has a meaningful keyword related to your website content, search engines will give you more preference for that specific keyword.
The second part of domain is ‘.com’, this is called as the extension of the domain. Extensions are predefined part of domain which has limited amount of flexibility of choice. Extension of your domain will decide on whether it will be allowed to be featured in search engine results or not. All the search engines maintain a list of extensions which they refer while providing ranking preference to websites. It is therefore important to pick an extension which is accepted by all the search engines for ranking.
You can also at times select an extension based on focus area of your website. For example: If you are building a website for government or government affiliated organisation, you can use ‘.org’ or ‘.gov’ (.gov is reserved strictly for websites directly linked to government). In a similar manner, if your website is going to be a video streaming website, you can use extension like ‘.tv’ and so on. Such specific extension not only helps you to pass your website motive more clearly to your audience, it will also help you rank better in your genre. You can find a list of top-level domains to choose from using this Wikipedia page.
Domain name thus helps us to increase our audience, improve their trust and also helps us improve our SEO and improve ranking.
Tips to remember while selecting a domain
In order to further simplify your domain selection process, we have made a list of tips you can follow which will help you focus on points that are required to select an ideal domain for your website.
Without further due, let’s start the list
1. Select widely accepted domain extension
With the availability of wide range of different top-level domains, it can at times be very tempting to try newer top-level domains for your website. But not all extensions are treated by search engines equally. It is therefore safe to use ‘.com’ extension if you are not aware with the effect of different extension on your future ranking.
If your domain choice does not go well with ‘.com’ and are looking to find a good and popular alternative to ‘.com’, you can use this chart provided by statista which provides you most popular top-level domains according to percentage of use.
2. Include content related keyword in your domain
Google for its SEO ranking has over 200 parameters which it uses to provide points and ranking to website. One of such point is relevancy of domain name with the content. Content if needed can be modified in future for SEO but domain is generally one-time thing and thus it is important to include keyword in your domain which describes majority of your future website content.
Using content focused keyword in the domain will not only help you in SEO, it will also help your audience understand the type of content they will get from your website. Selecting a right keyword needs some research on points like keyword search volume, ranking difficulty etc. For this purpose, there are multiple tools available like ubersuggest, semrush, ahrefs, google console etc. which you can use to find ideal keyword for your domain.
3. Find domain name which is short, easy to spell and pronounce and unique
Along with having content relevant keyword in your domain, it is also important to make sure your domain name is short in length, easy to spell and pronounce and has uniqueness in it. Try to avoid names with repeating letters and characters.
Shorter domain names can be at times premium and expensive, in that case, you can search that domain on our website smartchoicedomains, we can assure you best price in the market if it is available with us.
4. Avoid using hyphens and double letters
In order to provide you domain a higher authority rank and maintain good ranking in search engines, try to avoid hyphen and double letters in your domain. Such domain names are considered spam and hard to remember and thus are not given preference in SEO ranking.
Tools to find ideal domain
After understanding the points, you should take care and remember while selecting a domain, it is now time to do domain name search. The tools mentioned below will help you with searching of domain names, their prices and also provide you further guidance on it is a great domain. Without further delay, let’s start the list.
1.Dotomator
The very first tool on our list is a unique domain suggesting tool which will take prefix and suffix choose by you from their list and suggest domain names which are available. Dotomator not only provide you suggestion for domain, it also checks if it is available to purchase or not which makes it a very useful tool to find domain name inspiration and available domain names out of it.
Only caveat with this tool is it does not provide specific price for the domain straight away.
2. GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one stop website for domain name search and purchase. GoDaddy prices too are among the most competitive. They have a very simple to use interface on their home page itself where you can search for the domain name and it will provide you details on whether it is available or not, what are other Top-level domain available and what will be its costing yearly.
They also have a small ‘Why its great’ section below every domain name suggestion which will give you SEO related plus points of the domain. This section can be helpful to understand more about the domain and further help you to compare multiple domains.
3. Nameboy
Similar to dotomator, Nameboy is a tool which accepts one or two keywords and provides you domain suggestion using it. It uses bluehost database to check the availability of the domain.
Unlike dotomator, Nameboy provides link to buy the domain name too. If you are just starting your research on domain name and currently only have a general keyword with you, this tool can help you to get great head start by providing suggestions similar to that keyword.
Although, we have noticed that many suggestions given by Nameboy are already taken and thus it is always recommended to check the domain availability once before shortlisting it.
4. Smartchoicedomains
If the domain you were looking for is premium and expensive, you can always check our service to get it at a fair price. We have a huge collection of domains available with us and are constantly increasing the collection daily.
We have a simple to use search bar on our home page which you can use to search the domain.
Conclusion
Domain name selection is not easy and at time stressful too. There are 100’s of parameters to consider while selecting your domain name and taking care of each parameter is certainly not possible. We hope our focused list of tips and important points will help you in the process of domain selection and will further simplify your task.
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