Choosing a Domain Name for Your New Business

Choosing a domain name for your new business can be tricky. There are quite a few taken names already, and some people have trouble finding one they want. If your company name is unique you’ll have no trouble finding a domain name that’s available.

As a general solution you can add “Inc” or “Incorporated” or “LLC” or some other extension to your business name and you’ll usually be able to find a domain name that matches your business name well.

Generally you don’t want a domain name more than 20 characters. That’s a number I pulled out of thin air – but, the longer your domain name, the least interested people are in typing it out.

Even 15 character domains are a bit long to type out. The good news is that newer browsers these days are making it easy for us to re-visit websites we’ve been to already once in the past. FireFox 3.5 browser that I use now will auto-complete the entire domain name for me after typing just a couple characters. That’s good news for business websites with long domains.

Still, a long domain name is not usually very memorable. Whereas a short – 8-10 character domain will be much easier to remember.

The usual caveat about using dashes in your domain name still applies. Don’t use them if you can avoid using them. In the past search engines like Google used to not be so good about separating words in domain names that were joined together without a dash. We chose florida-incorporation.com eleven years ago because it was a great domain then. Today it’s still great, but there’s no need for the dash anymore – the search engines are adept at parsing out names without dashes.

Choosing .com as the suffix is also your best bet. The .net, .org, and other extensions didn’t really catch on like some thought they would. The .com extension is the standard and the one you should get for your new business in most cases.

If you want to buy the .org, and .net version of your .com domain name then that might be a smart idea.

Where is the best place to buy your domains? Godaddy.com is the largest domain name registrar in the USA. If you buy a website hosting account with them they’ll give you your domain name for just $1.99 (at time of this writing 7/09). Godaddy hosting for your business website (or personal) is also VERY affordable – about $60 for a year. Your new business won’t likely need more than the economy account that gives a lot of bandwidth and server space.

If you are interested in learning more about setting up your domain name, hosting and building a website for your new business we’ll be offering elearning courses here shortly to help you do just that – and every other step you need to get up to speed. Check back often.