Choosing Domain Names

How to choose a successful domain name.

More than 50 million domain names have been registered worldwide and thousands new ones are added per day. It might be hard for you then to get the name that you really like for your website. Do not get discouraged from that fact, but rather try to be creative.

Remember that you can use a combination of almost all characters (letters, numbers, hyphens) for your domain. The length of a domain name can vary, but generally speaking it should be a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 67 characters.

Here are some tips how to choose a successful domain name:

International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues

Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLD) For example .com.au is widely used here in Australia.

Suggested Best Practices:

A good first question to ask is “Who exactly are we targeting? If you are targeting a specific country, targeting a specific language-speaking audience, or your web site copy is specifically for a country or language-specific audience, use a ccTLD (country code top level domain) that relates to your target country rather than a general .com domain.

For example, a ccTLD would look like www.domain.fr, www.domain.ca, www.domain.jp, or www.domain.co.uk. Always use ccTLDs for each language of your site.

Benefits Of Best Practices:

A ccTLD communicates to search engines the focus of your site.

A ccTLD is the quickest and most accurate way to communicate regionality to the search engines.

A ccTLD assigns more weight for local search. It allows your site to be more easily included in Google Australia, Google UK, etc.

Search engines tend to have higher confidence and often give a ranking boost to a ccTLD site for local searches. For example, Google France may give a more favorable ranking to a France-specific (.fr) site.

A listing of all ccTLD’s can be found at http://www.iana.org/root-whois/index.html