Domain Name – One of the Big Decisions When Starting a Blog

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When you write your home address, you have a number and a street name or a house name then the village or town you live in, the county or state, and the postcode (or zip code).  But when you want to write the address of a website, you have a website address and this is called the domain name. 

When you are starting a blog or a blog for a business, choosing the domain name is one of the early decisions and is one that definitely is worth spending a bit of time on.

Understanding domain names

Back in the mid-1980s, when the internet first started to spread across the world, there were four main top-level domains (TLD):

• .com – for US companies
• .org – for non-profit organisations and charities
• .edu – for schools, colleges, and universities
• .gov – for the government

As the use of the internet spread around the world, regional domain names began to appear such as the familiar .co.uk here in the UK.  These were known as the country code TLD and were assigned to countries around the world.  So, when I looked for the domain name for a website and found that .com was in use, I went with the .co.uk because I’m in the UK.

Newer additions to the list of suffixes that you can use on your website include a range of specialist ones including .info for information sites, .net for technical sites, .biz for businesses and e-commerce sites, and even .me for blogs or personal resumes.

Choosing a domain name

Choosing a domain name is about more than just picking up the name of your business or your blog and using it with whatever top-level domain is available.  After all, there are some considerations that come into the decision, both in terms of user experience and search engines.  Here are a few to help you consider your domain name.

Is it brandable?

It can be easy to call yourself something that is very practical and use a few special characters to make your address a little different from everyone else. 

But if you are a fashion blogger and you call your domain www.fashionblogger2407.com then this isn’t massively brandable – after all, what does it mean?  Isn’t it better to have a name, a brand that you can use in your domain name that is memorable and easy to use?

Is it easy to say?

Okay so a lot of the time people will be typing and not saying the name of your website but there’s still something that Moz called ‘processing fluency’.  This is the idea that it is easier to search for something if you can say it easily and therefore it becomes more memorable. 

Like that fashion blogger above – what were the numbers on the end of her website again?  The aim is to have a name that is brandable, easy to say, and…

Does it have keywords in it?

…has your keywords in it in some form.  Hence this blog was originally called The Blogging Blog – a blog about blogging.  It wasn’t original or ground shaking but it is pretty clear what the blog is about and there are two important keywords there in the title (by the way, I had help coming up with it as I’m useless at naming things).  It later became the name of my business because I wanted to grow awareness of my services as well as the content I was creating.

Going back to our fashion blogger, maybe she specialises in purple outfits so including ‘purple’ and ‘fashion’ in her domain name might be a good idea.  Some do recommend that you avoid using numbers in your domain name because people can be confused between the number and the spelled-out version.

Is it as short as possible?

While you don’t want to make the name so short that it doesn’t help you any (so calling this The Blog wouldn’t have worked for a host of reasons), you do want to keep the name to the minimum for a range of reasons.  Not only are longer names harder to remember, but they are also easier to mistype and therefore have people sent to an error screen.

There are also other considerations such as when you use it on social media; if you have a name that is eight or nine words long, the domain name looks really weird on places like Pinterest.  I actually saw one the other day like this and the name stuck off the side of the Pin.  Yes, it caught my eye but only because the name was so long.

Other considerations for your domain name

By now, you are likely starting to fill in your checklist of ideas for domain names relating to the name of your business or what you want to call your blog.  But don’t go buy those domains just yet as there are a couple of other considerations.

First, watch your name doesn’t infringe on anyone else, especially if that anyone is a big company that will take the huff.  For example, if our fashion blogger was into purple and Disney, she should avoid using Disney in her domain name – they won’t like it and you can even get into legal trouble by seeming to affiliate yourself with the brand. 

Also ensure that your name isn’t too similar to your competitors as you can just blur into them, especially if they have been established longer than you.

The .com snobbery

According to a lot of experts, there is still some snobbery associated with the newer domain suffixes as if they aren’t as ‘good’ as the .com and .co.uk examples.  Of course, after twenty years or so of people grabbing websites, you can’t always get the .com that you want. 

So while it is worth buying up the top-level domain when you can get it, you can consider the other alternatives and go for one that suits the purpose of your website.

Multiple domain names

The other thing you hear about is buying up all the variations of your domain names even if you aren’t planning to use them just to stop others from getting them. 

According to Yoast, there’s no real benefit in terms of branding and only minimal online ranking to this but it does allow you to maybe later use the different domains for different projects.  And if you do buy more than one domain, make sure you don’t put the same content on each one – that really won’t do your rankings any good!

You can check to see if the domain name you like is free with any number of tools and also with the hosting company you use (I buy mine through my host Lyrical Host). 

It pays to check as you go but to buy quickly once you have made up your mind as domains appear and disappear very quickly!

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