There are numerous reasons why many bloggers choose to have a unique domain name. Unique URL helps in building credibility and sense of professionalism. URL serves as a means of conveying the desired brand image. If you purchase a domain name, you will receive a bonus email address with the same domain, which further strengthens the professional feel of your blog. Moreover, carefully selected URL can improve search engine ranking.

Factors to consider in domain name selection

Choosing the right domain name could be as complicated as choosing the name of your first-born child. What I will discuss are the things to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. Since personal tastes also influence name selection, don’t expect that there is a gold standard for this procedure. You may see successful web sites that more or less consider these factors.

Goals and objectives

What is your long-term vision for your blog? Depending on the goals and objectives that you want to accomplish, your URL should have certain attributes that not only appeal to prospective web visitors but to search engine crawlers as well.

• What is the blog all about? It helps if the domain name of your blog is suggestive of its topic.
• What do you want to accomplish with your blog? Is it for hobby or business-oriented purposes (like marketing a professional service or generating advertising revenue)?
• What should it look like? Will your blog be written by one or many authors? How long are the posts?
• What’s the tone of the blog? Is it conversational, serious or humorous?
• Who are your target audience? Are they young, old or professional?

As you can see, naming a blog is like naming a business. Things that relate to product, target customer and brand image have to be considered.

How do you want prospective visitors to know your blog?

In addition to the existing readership base, traffic to a blog comes from two other sources: search engines and links from other sites.

The source of web traffic is a crucial factor in domain name selection. The relevance of the factors to be discussed next varies depending on which source of traffic you choose. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Keyword-based domains

These domains contain keywords suggestive of the content of a blog. A keyword-rich domain has several advantages. First, it makes it easy for blog visitors to judge whether the information they need is covered by the blog. Second, search engines index and rank web sites with reference to its domain name. Therefore, keyword-based domain will benefit blogs that heavily rely on SE-generated traffic. Examples of keyword-based domain names are Mobilephone7, Digital Photography Lab, the Movie Blog and Sims Gamer.

Brandable domains

Brandable names are mainly intended to facilitate name recall and emphasize brand image, though such domains more or less connote the topic or theme of blogs. If you want to create a loyal readership base, use brandable domain names. Brandable names should also be able to deliver good SE ranking, since keywords are not the only metrics used in web site indexing. As a matter of fact, many blogs cited in Technorati’s Top 100 use brandable names and not keyword-based ones.  Examples of brandable domains are Boing Boing and Gizmodo.

You can also combine keyword-based and brandable domains. For instance, “Engadget” not only suggests the blog topic (gadget) but creates a memorable domain name as well.

Which of the two naming strategies is better is a highly debatable topic.  Supporters and critics of each strategy raise good points, making it difficult for a novice blogger to decide between the two options.

Future scope of a blog

When choosing a domain name, you should consider how likely you are to broaden the topic of your blog. You may find yourself in a situation in which your keyword-based domain is too narrow to describe the overall content of your blog. If your blog is likely to develop into numerous sub-niches, consider a keyword-based or brandable domain that is more flexible to suit the expanded scope of your blog in the future.

The second thing to consider is whether you’ll run a single site with multiple blogs like About.com. The site runs numerous blogs with distinct domain names.

And finally, don’t use a domain name that is time specific. Usually, the popularity of such names is short-lived.

Name length

Both short and long domain names have advantages. Technically, a domain can go as long as 67 characters. However, many prefer shorter ones for a number of reasons. The shorter the domain names are, the less would be the room for errors when typing the URL. Shorter ones are also easy to remember and more suited to word-of-mouth marketing.

On the other hand, longer domain names have a lot of rooms for keywords. More keywords in domain names means higher search engine ranking.

Top level domains (TLD)

The most popular TLDs are .com, .net and .org. Which TLD is better is subject to debates, as each has distinct advantages. Generally, TLD falls into either of the two categories: country code TLD and generic TLD (i.e., .com, .org and .net).

Here are the factors to consider when choosing TLD:

• Internet law – Legal provisions pertaining to TLD vary from country to country.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – Many debates over TLD choice center on the issue of SEO. Many think that .com is the best choice as far as SEO is concerned, followed by .net and .org. On the other hand, the use of country code TLD improves local search engine ranking. If your target audience is not bound in a specific country, I recommend that you use either .com or .net.
• Memorability – .com is the most popular TLD. If your domain name ends with other TLDs, you may drive away prospective visitors who always use .com in their browser’s address bar.

Use of hyphens

This is another debatable issue in domain name selection. There are two main reasons why you might want to use hyphenated URL. The first is the desire to use a name that is already taken by other sites. Though most of the good names are already used, they can still be adopted by adding minor variations like a hyphen. Another good reason for using a hyphen is SEO. URLs with domain names parsed by hyphens are recognized by search engine crawlers more easily.

But before you hyphenate your URL, take a look first at its disadvantages:

• Hyphenated domain names are more difficult to remember.
• It’s inconvenient to recite a URL with hyphens, thus impeding with word-of-mouth marketing.
• Hyphenated domain names are more likely to be misspelled.
• Many webmasters treat heavily-hyphenated URLs as spams.

Alphanumeric address

Another way to adopt a popularly used domain name is to modify it by adding numbers at the beginning or end of it. This technique increases the chance of your site to land into a higher search rank, but doing so may damage its professional image.

Easy-to-remember names

It is a general rule to choose a domain name that is easy to spell, pronounce, remember and type. While considering the aforementioned factors, make your domain name as simple as possible, or else you may turn off prospective visitors.

Observe trademark and Internet laws

Check if your desired domain name is trademarked to avoid costly lawsuits. Legal threats have plagued a number of bloggers, forcing them to change their domain names.

Adding the ‘blog’ word

The main advantage of using the word “blog” in the domain name is that it opens up new naming options. However, this may prevent new bloggers from modifying the name of their sites when shifting from a blog into a different format. Another disadvantage is the reduced capacity of serving blog-related advertisements sponsored by Google’s AdSense. If the word “blog” is mentioned frequently in a site, ad relevancy may be affected.

Creating multiple domains

Many professional webmasters recommend this practice in order to protect niche in certain circumstances. If you have a domain name ending with .com, you may also try to simultaneously run the same blog under similar domain names, but this time ending with .org or .net.

Ask the opinions of others

Being too preoccupied with domain name selection may cloud your judgment. Make sure to include the opinions of your friends and prospective visitors before buying a domain. Also keep in mind that people from cultures other than yours may respond differently to a particular domain name.

Black-listed domain names

Google bans defunct domain names that were purchased and then abandoned by spammers. If your blog uses such domain name, it will be mistaken as a spam and be bypassed by search engines.

Again, let me emphasize that the above guidelines do not purport to guarantee a high-traffic site nor a SE-topnotcher.  As a matter of fact, many successful sites deviate from the above rules. The bottomline is that there are ways to increase the chance of getting web visitors. It’s up to you to decide how “smart” you want your domain name to be.

• Samantha Says:
  May 1st, 2009 at 12:50 am

  OMG.. I never thought that therez so much into just getting a domain for the blog…
  Ya have opened my eyes …
  Samantha
  smartappsportal.com

• Lyla Says:
  May 8th, 2009 at 11:26 pm

  your article valuable and most information. thank you for sharing with me