If you’re in business today, you have a website. In fact, there’s an excellent chance you have multiple websites, or at least multiple domain names pointing to your primary website. Choosing those domain names must be done with care.

You can use different domain names as tracking devices to test your various advertising and promotion campaigns. The different names might point to the same site but they let you see where the traffic is coming from. Or you might set up sites for special campaigns or specific products, and those sites will need their own names. You might also want to own (whether you use or not) domain names that are variations of your company’s name to prevent competitors or detractors from using them.

Use these tips to choose domain names that are effective and will work for you:

1. Use simple words that are easy to remember and spell. Don’t make people have to work too hard to find your website, because they won’t.

2. Keep it short. The longer the name, the greater the risk of a mistake when it’s typed into a browser. Shorter URLs are easier to write when you are filling out a form by hand (that still happens!). They’re also easier to remember. And there’s less chance of a shorter URL breaking across a line in text when it’s published in a newspaper or magazine article, which may cause confusion for readers.

3. Make it something that’s easy to say out loud. Even if you expect that most of your traffic will be coming from links, you still should be able to say, “Visit our website at ‘our company dot com’ to sign up for our newsletter,” and be clearly understood the first time.

4. Avoid hyphens and underscores. First, these make it awkward to say the domain name out loud; second, they increase the chances people will make a mistake when typing the URL.

5. Use numbers with caution. You don’t have to exclude numbers from your domain name, but consider that they can cause confusion. For example, if your domain name is CompanyOne.com and you are saying it, listeners may not know if they should type “companyone.com” or “company1.com”.

Once you choose your primary domain name and secure it with one extension, consider purchasing that name with other extensions. For example, if you have the .com version, you may also want to get the .org, .cc, .biz, .mobi, and others, and have those URLs point to your primary website. Most domain registration services (such as GoDaddy) will suggest these options when you are buying your names.

Finally, consider what common typos or misspellings people are likely to use when trying to get to your site, purchase those domains and point them to your primary site.

Jacquelyn Lynn
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