Choosing the right domain name

Getting the right domain name for your budding online venture can make a huge difference to its success. Here are a few suggestions to bear in mind when researching your perfect domain name:

• Make it catchy, memorable and relevant: choose a catchy, easily identifiable domain name that’s relevant to your business and easy for people to remember.
• Use a country specific top level domain (ccTLD) to appeal to a local audience: if your market is local, it often pays to register the local version of the domain (.co.uk or .ie, for example) instead (or as well as) the more generic .com, .net or .org. If you’re appealing to an international audience, a generic TLD may serve you better. Of the generic TLDs .com is by far the most universally accepted and popular – making it the most valuable one to secure.
• You can buy multiple domain names: there’s nothing to stop you buying more than one domain to prevent others from registering them. You can then redirect or park the secondary domains so that they point to your main website. Another option is registering country specific domains to give yourself an online ‘presence’ in each country you do business in. You can then deploy a regionally tailored version of your website to each of those domains (the preferable option), or redirect them to a localised section on your main website.
• Keywords in a domain name can be beneficial: you may decide to incorporate one of your keyword phrases into your domain name. Opinion varies on the significance of this in terms of its impact on your search engine ranking, but it may help both search engines and users to establish what your site is about right from the start.