When it comes to creating a website or undertaking a PPC campaign, a crucial factor to your website or landing page is with the domain name that you choose to use. In an ideal world, we would all like to choose whatever domain name we want that we think fits best with our website/landing page’s needs. However, after the internet boom in the early 2000s, you will be hard done by to find a good domain name that has not already been taken. For this reason, you have to be savvy in order to get a professional looking domain name at a fraction of the cost that the really good ones are selling for online. For this reason, here are some tips to help you pick and choose the right domain name.

#1 Use ‘.com’

Although there will be other domain extension you can use, which keep getting introduced at quite a rate, the only one you should ever think about is the ‘.com’ extension. This is because:

• It is the most widely known domain extension by people, both tech savvy and those that are not.
• It is the most used domain extension on the internet.
• Many smartphone keyboards and other types of keyboards have a ‘.com’ button implemented into them.
• It shows that you got the domain name of your choice – domains that do not have ‘.com’ tend to mean that they didn’t get the domain they wanted with the .com extension and had to settle for a different domain extension.

It’s also a habit for the vast majority of people to stick .com at the end of any website out of habit when searching directly.

#2 Shorter the better

The shorter the domain name, the better in terms of SEO, memorising it and also looking professional:

• Domain names with less characters tend to have better SEO, since search engines give more weight to fewer characters than longer domain names, where they can get confused  with what the website is targeting from the long domain.
• An important part to any website is direct traffic. Even for content mills that work on SEO alone, you will still tend to find that you will get 15-20% of the traffic directly. With this being the case, you need to make sure your domain name is easy to memorise for your traffic, and catchy if you can incorporate that too.
• The shorter the domain name, the more professional it looks. However, with this, adding random characters throughout your domain name, inbetween keywords, will not work towards a professional look.

#3 Use Keywords

Using keywords in your domain name is crucial both to SEO and to help your reader understand what your website is about. You can create a new brand from scratch, like I did for AskWillOnline.com. However, this will take added time and effort to get the SEO up and to gain brand awareness. The best domain names are the ones that create new brands through incorporating keywords. For example, if you are a website about selling cars, having a brand name such as ‘TheCarSalesman.com’ incorporates ‘car’ and ‘sales’ into your domain name whilst producing a new brand to work with.