As a business owner or website owner, you may have faced the task of choosing suitable business domain names. Choosing business names may be a lot less simple process than choosing business domain names for a number of different reasons.
The tendency is to name the business, and then register a domain. However, what often happens, is that the domain matching the name of your business is perhaps already taken, as domains can be easily registered at much less than the cost of registering business names.
The names were thought to be critical components in branding and marketing. The Uniform Resource Locator or URL, is the address that is used to connect to your website, and so it was believed that easy recognition would come from business domain names that contained the name of the business. The issue is not that simple, as anyone can register a domain name, and it is done on first-come first-serve basis.
If the name of your business is my business, a good idea, was to choose business domain names that include the word my business. However, with the evolution of search engine technologies, including the name of the business in the domain may make it easy for humans to locate your site, but for search optimization, it was more important that the names include keywords, which tells the search engines what your business is about.
You can see that compromises were needed, and so did the search engines operators, who perceived that business domain names that contained keywords provided advantages, and they were also vulnerable to abuse by website owners who were able to get better ranking with top level domain names that contained keywords, but what was also deemed to be inferior content. They reacted
by penalising sites that contain keywords in top level domains or TLDs.
The task is complex, as it is still important that your business domain names are unique, and reflect the essence of your business, but should not include your keywords. It should also be unique, memorable, and not too long.
What was also important, was the extensions which are attached to the domain. However, the web is rapidly evolving and there are much more important considerations than extensions. The dot com extensions were once the most valued extension, but often they may have already been registered. The alternatives were others such as .net, .info, or .org.
These are no longer concerns, as there are now extensions available for every genre. Among the most important question now, when choosing business domain names, is whether a location should be included. There is no advantage to including a region, if your customers are anywhere in the world.
The best option is to obtain business domain names that match that of your business, and include a region only if your service is local.
