| By :
Dirik Hameed
People who run businesses will find within time that they need to sort out an online presence for their company. This is important because the internet is becoming ever more vital in how businesses are run, and they need to ensure that the presence they have on the internet accurately reflects the quality of their product and sells it best to potential consumers. Everything to do with the website - from design and color scheme to content - needs to look professional and great, and anything less than perfection can have a serious knock on effect on how they will do business. However, more than the look and the textual content of a web site, the use of domain registration needs to be considered first and foremost. There are several things which can go right and some things which can go horribly wrong when picking the domain of a website. It can seriously affect how a website is perceived and therefore how that brand is associated with other things in people's minds. With a bad URL, a website will find itself mired in consequence in Google searches and against its competition. Here is what to do and what not to do when picking a name. DO sell what a brand does front and center. It can be great to name a website after the brand name, but if that has nothing to do with the product offered then people on the internet will often end up clueless. The way people work online is that they often search for keywords, occasionally typing them into their address bar and adding a . Com afterwards. For that reason, it can be useful to name a site after what a business does, and where it does it. DO register variations on the domain. If a company is the owner of magicalpets.com, they should also try and get the . Net and . Co.uk level domains as well. This is because most people navigate their way around the internet by remembering everything before the dot. After it, they presume that it is one of the more popular ones. They will therefore often put in the wrong ending, and it is important they are redirected to the correct address. DO make sure that it does not mean something else. There is a very popular pen manufacturer called Pen Island which has seen inordinate amounts of traffic to its site which has resulted in precious few sales. Why? Because when you run the words pen and island together you get something entirely different. Common sense checks are done before a person decides to name a child, and so it should be the same with a website address. DON'T have a long URL. People are very forgetful, and having to remember thirty or more characters can be tiresome and leave people open to spelling mistakes and plain forgetting or jumbling up word order. Short, snappy addresses are the order of the day. People have become inured to anything longer than a 140 character tweet - they are not going to remember a complicated URL. DON'T get too close to competitors. People may have snaffled up the best URLs, but going for something similar to a competitor can be suicide. If someone accidentally visits a competitor's site, they may well change their allegiance. That can end up badly. Picking domain names is something that is not actually hard. However poor decisions and ill thinking by many make it seem more difficult than it is. People need to think carefully before committing to something which is as vital as the name that people will use on their online presence. Without consideration, things can go horribly wrong and cripple a company before they even get a chance to excel.
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