How important is a Domain Name to your Business?
From a marketing perspective, a domain name is the single most important element of a website. Unlike a bricks-and-mortar company, websites don’t have visual cues closely associated with them. Whereas potential customers can use visual cues to identify if a physical building is more likely a barber shop or a bank, they are not able to tell the difference between domain names.
All domain names use the exact same format: http:// subdomain dot (optional) root domain dot TLD (Top-Level Domain). Take, for example, www.google.com or www.bing.com. To an outsider, there is no reason to think that any of these resources would be a search engine. They linked-to domains on the Internet, you see this trend over and over again: Wikipedia, YouTube, W3, Amazon, don’t contain the word search, and if their brands weren’t already so strong, their names would be meaningless to anyone. In fact, if you look at the top 100 most Macromedia, MSN, Flickr, Twitter, eBay—the list goes on. This is where people get confused - they see these websites and think that the domain name doesn’t matter – what they don’t realize is, that the popular websites got popular despite their domain names, rather than because of their domain names.
For the vast majority of websites a “search friendly” domain name is by far the best. Search engines will always be guided by the fact that many people search for exact URLs when they want to go to websites. The most relevant and popular result for the query “myspace.com” would be www.myspace.com. If at all possible, you should use this to your advantage.
TIPS for your domain name:
Avoid hyphens: In domain names, hyphens detract from credibility and act as a spam indicator.
Avoid some of the uncommon top-level domains (TLDs): Like hyphens, TLDs such as .info, .ws, .cc, and .name are spam indicators.
Avoid domain names longer than 15 characters: People are lazy so don’t try to make them type a whole sentence just to access your website.
Avoid other permutations: The owners of ExpertsExchange.com built a sizable brand before they realized their domain name could be misconstrued as ExpertSexChange.com.
This advice about domains applies mostly to people who are either starting out from scratch, or for whom purchasing a better domain is an option.