If you’re running an online business, your domain name is your brand. Making a good choice of domain name is paramount. Remembering three key points will help you to make a successful choice.

1. Choose a short name.

Ideally, avoid choosing a domain name with more than three syllables. Most of the best-known online businesses have short, snappy names: Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and so on. These names are memorable, they fit on a business card, they are easy to spell, easy to brand and easy to pronounce.

2. Avoid confusing names.

Names with words that can be spelled in more than one way, or which can be replaced with a letter (like "you"/U or "why"/Y), are a bad idea – on the radio or over the telephone, it will be hard to put across the correct spelling of your domain name. Equally, try to make sure that your domain name is easy to pronounce. If you are going to be marketing in both the UK and the US, avoid words which are spelled differently on either side of the Atlantic.

3. Choose a memorable name.

Strings of random letters are almost as hard to remember as an IP address! There are lots of ways of creating a distinctive domain name. Google is a great example of a memorable made-up word; its bizarreness makes it stick in the mind. If you do make up a word, again make sure that it is spelled phonetically, is easy to pronounce, and is nice and short. The advantage of making up a word is that chances are it won’t already have been registered by someone else.

Also, unless you have huge marketing resources for building a brand, it’s a good idea to choose a domain name that relates to your business. Your customers will be more likely to remember the name of your website if it relates to the reason they are visiting you.

Finally, an important element of a memorable domain name is that it ends in .com. Your customers will assume that you have a .com address and will almost always type that into their browser first. If you register a .net or .info address because the .com isn’t available, expect to lose traffic to the owner of the .com!

To summarise:

Make sure that your domain name is short, not confusing, and memorable. Following these simple guidelines will make your chances of selecting a great domain name much better.

Author: Natalie Catchpole