WhyYouNeedThatPerfectName.com
“What’s in a name? That
which we call a rose,
By any other name would
smell as sweet”
-Shakespeare (Romeo and
Juliet)
A
rose perhaps but not your domain name!
Welcome
to the dotcom bubble! Here, any successful e-tailer
should tell you that there’s more to a name than just the name itself. This
article serves precisely that purpose –against the backdrop of quality domain
naming strategies and styles, auctions, speculators and court conflicts, to
convince you why your online endeavor needs that perfect domain name.
There’s no
point in coming up with that absolutely fabulous idea for online selling plus a
perfect site to launch from, as long as you don’t have ‘the’ name you need.
Choosing a name that will eventually contribute to your brand equity, profits,
internet marketing and above all -your online credibility, shouldn’t be done
haphazardly. Especially, since it’s so easily purchased (for a low startup
capital), easily maintained and one that, if you choose, may be disposed off at
a substantial amount. Intentionally or otherwise, your domain name becomes your
de facto brand name, a location or an experience your visitors relate to in the
long run. Even if you plan to sell it later on to prospective buyers, it is
only an asset! Your challenge is to come up with that one name to funnel
visitors through.
Brandmeisters today seem to understand the significance of
site names, especially since the emergence of a number of me-too sites.
Like a Washington Post reporter put it – “feature for feature, service for
service, discount for discount, even annoyance for annoyance”, a number of
sites may turn out to be a close match to yours. Quoting Rebecca Saunders,
author of the Big Shot series, “Names have to sound fresh and new even if the
site duplicates one already on the net. Names should stir the imagination or otherwise
gain the surfer’s attention. Further site name should be as simple as possible,
they should be believable, and they should be easy to pronounce, pleasing to
the ear, easy to spell and therefore easy to look up on a search engine.”
Here’s more on building your handle.
The
‘aha’ name
Domain name
consultants will serve you innumerable dos and don’ts on internet domain naming
– a feat that could leave you grumbling with limited choices. Personally, your
domain naming methodology need not be absolutely conventional, as long as your
imagination is not slave to impractical logic and common sense.
Begin
with a paper, pencil and loads of patience. Consider seeking the advice of kith
and kin, while you scramble ideas in your brain. Follow closely on what you
ought to and ought not to consider. For example, consider characteristics,
features, advantages and possibly anything that relates to your products and
services. Now try to come up with a domain name that either addresses that one
fundamental concept of the site, or that weds two or more key concepts in a
single name. All the while, keep in mind, your site’s goals, the image you wish
to portray and your target audience. Don’t compromise on your image-how you
want your company to be perceived and it’s relation to your core business memorability. Jot down your list of ideas. Then narrow it
down to those names you think are most reflective of your products/services.
Most importantly, determine if the domain name you like is available and that
it doesn’t violate any existing trademarks or copyrights. The last thing you’d
want is your hard thought idea of that domain name accidentally offending a
fellow netizen. Make sure that it doesn’t mean
something entirely different in another language and that you don’t spare
chance for the public to associate anything negative with it (easier said than
done!). Care for the ins and outs of classic and non classic approaches in
domain naming? Read on.
Unless
you are a domain name squatter or a start-up capitalizing on domain names -
save those tongue-twisters, masqueraded phrases and unpronounceable names.
Your
creativity levels, thought and effort should be directed towards one that’s short
and sweet. Though, a long name, embedded with your major keywords, can get
your site a high search engine ranking, there is no reason you should take
advantage of the 67 character limit provided for domain names. Besides, you are
too late now. The record of the longest domain name has been set by a Welsh
village, with its registration of
llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com.
Concentrate on your visitors comfort levels. Leave them no scope for
confusion and no loophole to err. Give them a name they can easily guess
(without having to quip over the spelling and the location of hyphens) and
hopefully, they’ll reciprocate with more clicks.
You
could always rely on those prefixes (e, i,
net, web, the, my) and suffixes (world, business, company, store). The
power of vowels unleashed, you’d generate a potential brand name. E.g.
ebay.com, ivillage.com, pcworld.com, smallbusiness.com
Lucky the
business if it’s creator has that perfect proper noun to lend his site a
name. Atkins.com named after Dr. Atkins and Dell.com after its founder
and CEO Michael Dell. A traditional business moving online could capitalize on it’s established brand name. Even acronyms
could yield quick domain names. Microsoft is an acronym for MICROcomputer
SOFTware and so is Yahoo for Yet Another
Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Targeting search
engine rankings – e.g. Yahoo that follows alphabetic classification of
websites – consider site names beginning with the digit 1 or the letter ‘a’.
Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com, cites this as
one of his reasons for the name’s choice.
But for those
of you driven by the age old myth – that search engines have a liking for words
that are separated by dashes- wake up! Today, when search engines focus on the
site content, hyphenated names have no influence. Domain names with or without hyphens
is in itself a topic for a forum. A good idea is to register both options if
possible and redirect visitors to one site. Walmart.com never let go off it’s original registration (wal-mart.com), even after it
changed name. Now both names take you to the same site.
Think of it on
a broader angle. A few dollars spend to secure all possible variants of your
name (with alternate extensions) will secure your visitors, otherwise
likely to contribute to competitor site traffic. More - register possible names
your visitors are likely to associate to your domain. The retailer Buy.com registered the domains:
"10percentoffamazon.com," "10percentoffreel.com," and
"10percentoffegghead.com”. Proctor & Gamble is an extreme case of
this blanket approach. It registered hundreds of generic domain names relating
to all aspects of personal hygiene and healthcare: pimples.com, badbreath.com,
underarm.com, diarrhea.com etc. They advertise only one, but use the others to
bring traffic, and point all the domain names to one site.
Though generic
names can’t be trademarked, are sources of controversy and usually
unavailable (if not, costly), your prospective domain name could sound of the
genre of women.com, Hotels.com, Furniture.com, Art.com and shoes.com.
Nonetheless, the loss of uniqueness in generic names is a serious reason for
their unpopularity among namers. Now guess why Amazon
was’nt named book.com and ebay
not auction.com.
So, if the
dictionary lets you down, do not fret to think of words that are arbitrary,
previously unheard of and totally unrelated. Yahoo, Google and BlueTooth.com
don’t owe their origins to the thesaurus. Sometimes it pays to be whimsy!
allthegoodnamesaretaken.com
In just around 2 years, the number of website names registered
has grown from 200 to a voluminous 125,000 per month. And as yet, already over 1.6 million domains
have been registered, including the subtitle above! Chances of you finding a 3
character .com domain name unregistered (not on sale!), are thin… very thin.
Here’s the good
news. Everyday, around 20,000 domain names expire and get deleted. In addition
to the generic domain extensions such as .com, .net, etc. there are
approximately 250 different international domains each with their own
two-letter country code extension. Speculations of new TLD (Top Level Domain)
names include .firm, .store, .arts, .info, .nom, .biz, .pro, .aero, .coop,
.museum and .name.
So, don't
settle for the first domain name you think of! Although the supply of domain
names is diminishing daily, it's better to expend more thought at the beginning
and save money later. Don’t let the gold rush skate your decision (and later
leave you to regret over an unmarketable name). Then again, don’t sit just
hatching ideas. Even as you read this, someone halfway across the globe might
be beating you to your choice!
Some
are just registered by entrepreneurial opportunists hoping to make a fast buck
by selling it on. If your choice is taken, the easiest, cheapest and most
reliable solution would be to register another name. Did you know that the auction site
eBay.com was the second choice of it’s creator after his initial pick
EchoBay.com was taken? A good name is a legal name!
Nonetheless, if
you own a successful site, that just can’t do without that colonized ideal
name, you better ensure your pockets are deep because the owner at the other
end knows that there’s nothing quite like the commercial value of a domain
name. The highest publicly known sale of domain name was the sale of Business.com
for $7,500,000 to eCompanies, a business incubator.
Domain names have been turned into a marketing bargain with
its parking capability. A business can register or buy a name for later
use. And there are sites that do nothing but park potential names mostly sold
for fire-sale prices later on! A Belgian doctor, Dr. Lieven
P. Van Neste owns well over 200,000 domain names. It’s
a fine pursuit, if you care to keep your distance from brand infringement. In
the past, speculators have faced legal charges on trademark violations from the
bigwigs (including Microsoft) for having registered microsoftwindows.com,
microsoftoffice.com, AirborneExpress.com, CitibankMasterCard.com,
HewlettPackardss.com, and Wall-Mart.com. Domain name conflicts that grabbed
headlines - Yahoo
vs. "yahooka.com" (a marijuana site), Nissan Motors vs. Nissan
Computer Corporation. One that caught my personal appeal - Archie Comics company’s trademark driven domain dispute with Veronica.org,
a website set up by a loving dad in honor of his 2-year-old daughter Veronica!
From McDonalds
to MTV, a lot of press on online brand infringement ( the
hijack of popular brand names) has filled the air. Even as I write this, Google
Inc. is being challenged the right to use the name "Froogle"
for its online shopping service (a
Each year,
about 250,000 cases are decided by the
The crux
Your
domain name is more than a ubiquity. You have no other billboard or bypass to
your site. Statistics prove that direct navigation or guessed URLs account for
majority of the traffic to a site (64.43%), much more than the search engines
can bring (35.55%). Eat, drink and sleep on your idea before you move to
register that killer name. Don’t hassle, thinking there are
nodomainnamesleft.com (that’s taken too!). Your share of homework should save you a lot of
misery down the road.
Besides,
if you can’t trademark your design scheme, product idea and marketing strategy,
here’s something you can. Your domain name is perhaps the only thing that you can
own on the Internet. Remember, there’s always more to a name than just the name
itself! Happy naming!
Liji is a PostGraduate
in Software Science, with a flair for writing on anything under the sun. She
puts her dexterity to work, writing technical articles in her areas of interest
which include Internet programming, web design and development, ecommerce and
other related issues.
Source: http://www.ezinearticles.com