Choosing your Domain Name is a very important aspect of your online business. For me, this has been a bit of a chicken and egg situation in some ways. I wanted to build a website which resonates with who I am so that I can deliver authentic messaging. However, who I am, is not necessarily what everyone else is searching for. So, my site name “Late Bloomer Wealthy Affiliate”, as it turns out, doesn’t rank that highly – but, I can overcome that by use of strong keywords and SEO within my articles. I am getting ahead of myself, what we are talking about here is for your guidance, so that you learn How To Find the Best Domain Name for your website. Hopefully, this information will assist you to avoid some of the typical challenges.
Please, don’t despair if you have already selected and paid for your domain name, as I said, we can overcome the challenge with effective use of keywords and SEO – that’s a conversation for another day though. Let’s chat …
It can feel exactly like this image when you start out – beautiful but where do you go from here …
.
Table of Contents
What to Avoid
These may seem pretty obvious, but we sometimes get too close to our own work and overlook how others may interpret things or spell out words when they are searching online. So the basics are:
Rather avoid numeric, misspelled words and hyphens
They may look really funky and cool but we have to think about what people will type into the search bar when they are looking online. So, let’s look at an example, a restaurant by the name of Late Night Al’s, could have a domain like this: l8niteals.com. As you can see, that doesn’t look anything like Late Night Al’s. This incidentally, (the former spelling) is the name of a restaurant we used to frequent when I was younger – it was the spot to meet up after a great night at the pubs and clubs – generally, we were winding the night down with a meal in the early hours of the morning. I digress, memory lane can be so much fun to visit.
I am sure you can see that Late Night Al’s and l8niteals.com, though they sound the same, are nothing alike. If you asked a friend to search for Late Night Al’s online, it is highly doubtful they would type it in as l8niteals.com. Not a great interpretation of the business name at all. As you can see, the inclusion of the number “8” with an “l” in front of it sounds like the word “late” when you say it, but how many of us will spell “late” and “l8”?
Secondly, the word “night” is correctly spelled with the g, h and t. It is often spelled as “nite” but this is not correct spelling, so it opens things up to confusion and error.
The best option would be latenightals.com.
I know this seems obvious by when you are choosing your domain name, but options are presented to you when you do a domain search – it is better to be forearmed and understand the basics before you consider the options presented. They really can look great but be completely ineffective.
Jaaxy Research Tool Assistance
Here is a search I have done on Jaaxy (read more about this incredible tool here) and you will notice that there are a variety of options offered, from .com, .org, .net to also offering an option of including the hyphens, or dashes:
When it comes to the hyphen, or dash being included, as seen above with Late Night Al’s being presented as late-night-als.com Again, this doesn’t look bad, in fact, it could look really attractive to some folk. The challenge is, would you type in “late hyphen night hyphen als”? I know I wouldn’t. Rather stick with exactly what your business name is, if at all possible. There may be occasions where the domain has already been bought by someone else, that can be really frustrating, but it really is important to avoid any confusion – I hope you can see that from the explanation I am giving.
You could be in the situation where the brand or company name is already well-established and you would rather not change the name. That makes sense and in exceptional circumstances, you could consider the name with the hyphens or dashes included. There may even be a way in mainstream media, like radio or example, to have some fun with a website including hyphens, like a voice-over saying “don’t forget to dash to Late Night Al’s, no dashes, no dinner”. That may be a bit weak, it was just off the top of my head, lol! But you get the idea.
I notice that Jaaxy did not give us the option including any numeric, clever Jaaxy. As I said, you can read more about Jaaxy in this article.
You will notice that the research also offered options of .com, .org and .net. My understanding of the hierarchy is that the way the domain extensions rank, the order would be as follows:
- .com as Number 1
- .org as Number 2 (I stand to be corrected but my understanding of .org is NGO’s and NPO’s)
- .net as Number 3
Only after those three would we consider .info and .com with dashes (late-night-als.com). Make sense?
Exact Match Domains (EMD)
I am busy learning as I am writing, so bear with me on this one, please. So EMD stands for Exact Match Domains, that is pretty self-explanatory. If we look at this site https://latebloomerwealthyaffiliate.com that would be considered an EMD. Other examples are Facebook.com; Apple.com and Walmart.com – just to name some of the World’s Top Brands.
From what I understand, way back when (prior to 2013), EMDs were the best for keyword ranking, so if you typed Apple or Walmart into Google, Apple.com or Walmart.com would be the ones to appear.
Naturally, people took advantage of this but also went overboard creating tiny little websites for tiny little companies utilising these keywords, hardly fair on those unsuspecting people searching. So what did Google do? Adjusted their algorithm and many sites lost their rankings.
As you can imagine, this created a bit of havoc in the online world and the belief was that EMDs are no longer effective to rank as Google identified these as spammer sites. Thankfully, this is false.
According to the research I am looking at, EMDs rank as well as any other domain. Popular opinion is that EMDs are still higher ranking for their keywords. So go for it in other words!
Should we Choose EMDs?
If we decide to go with an EMD, we will likely have the advantage of ranking for the selected keyword. The low competition, high traffic keyword in the domain name will probably equal a lot of traffic – and without breaking a sweat! So yes, we should choose EMD’s.
It helps people who are searching for something specific too. So, let’s consider searching for Coca-Cola, you will land on coca-cola.com but what if it landed you on abi.co.za would you even know where you were? Incidentally, ABI stands for Amalgamated Beverage Industries in Africa who are also Coca-Cola, but internationally, I suspect that most people would not know that.
The Rule Breakers
Well, okay, you have me there! Yes, I am a rule breaker but in my defense, this was an “act of ignorance” and yes, a little bit of “I want to be who I want to be”. I love that I am a Late Bloomer, this has worked really well for me in my life. Would I have done some things differently – well of course! But I do love my Late Bloomer name and tagging Wealthy Affiliate onto it just made sense to me. I have also done so much work under this name already that I decided to let my article keywords attract traffic to my site.
It may not necessarily the best way to do it, but I love my Late Bloomer brand and intend sticking with it.
Let’s Get to a Recommendation – My Number One Recommendation on Where to Buy Your Domain
There are a few options you could consider but I would be remiss if I didn’t give you my Number One option and back up why. Let’s have a look:
It’s no secret that I am a Wealthy Affiliate Premium Member, but I am not obliged to buy my domains through Wealthy Affiliate – just another reason to love WA! I have the option to buy elsewhere but choose to buy here for the following reasons:
- Flat rates, I.e. $15 per annum and NO increases
- Privacy is FREE, you can pay between $3 and $10 in other places, EVERY YEAR!
- Free SSL (site security, vitally important): expect to pay anything between $9 and $70 elsewhere, EVERY YEAR!
Here’s a little comparison for you:
Go with Namecheap, who are pretty good and their domains are inexpensive at $10 per annum. Buuuut, taking the above into account, your pricing goes up to $50 per annum. Compare that to $15 per annum at Wealthy Affiliate.
You are welcome to go online and check out the prices at other places, here are two to consider: GoDaddy (very popular from what I understand but also offer loads of stuff to buy – I have an aversion to upsells for obvious reasons). Namecheap is the other one. Of course, you can Google and see what you can find too.
I am confident that Wealthy Affiliate will come up tops – in case you missed it, this is where to go. Would you like to read more about the option before going in? Here’s a link to another article I wrote, all about Site Rubix – yes, that is where you buy a Wealthy Affiliate domain.
My Final Words
It is so very exciting because the end result is that the domain is YOURS – your brand, your online (or offline) business, your very own brand. What you bring in terms of value is your content, people will be reading that – your awesome content – it is not all about your domain.
So in brief :
I truly hope this article assists you with information and food for thought. You are welcome to give me feedback in the comments below. I look forward to hearing from you.
Blessings
