Friday, April 5, 2013

Why The Best Domain Names Are Short




One question I often get from my new customers is "why should my domain name be short?” They are referring to the number of letters in the second level of the domain name. The maximum allowed at that level is 63, not including the com, net or org.  Second-level, to those of you who don’t spend their days reading about this arcane stuff, is the word that comes immediately after the com, net or org part of the domain; for example, “example” is the second-level domain name in “example.com.”  The ‘www’ you see so often is actually considered the third level. Simple, eh?

So now that we have settled that, back to our question: Why should my domain name be short?  The simple answer, like everything else in this world of ours is, it all depends. Who are you trying to please? Yourself? Customers? Fellow bloggers? Your mom? You can further filter that question by asking yourself: “Do I want to make money with this or just satisfy my urge to create?”

If making money is your thing, then you are going to want to lean towards short.  Why? Because people have short attention spans, short memories,  and the young have shortened written communications to a bunch of acronyms like LOL and BFF. That means if your name hasn’t caught their attention, hasn’t lodged in their memory, and can’t be instantly transcribed, you’ve lost a potential customer ten minutes after you’ve told him the name of your site.

Short then, is the way to go.  Unless, of course, those times when it isn’t: after all, what good is a short word if it’s awkward to spell, impossible to visualize, and therefore becomes difficult to remember?  Words like ‘sex’ or ‘gold’ make perfect names, easy to spell, very easy to visualize and impossible to forget.  

An example of a short word that wouldn’t make such a great name is ‘align.’ Many people misspell it as ‘aline.’  Even a good speller would hear ‘a line’ when the word is taken out of context as it would be if you were sitting in a coffee shop talking about your drapery business and mentioned your website as “align dot-com.” Who, you ask,  would call their drapery business ‘align’ or ‘aline dot-com.'  Oh, I don’t know, maybe some of the same people that once called a search engine ‘Yahoo’ or ‘Google.’

But don't stress out looking for short, four letter words like the ones I've used as examples. They have all been registered by someone else a long time ago, and it would cost you many thousands of dollars to touch any of them. Or many millions, as in the case of sex dot-com. For that matter, virtually every word in the English language – short or long--has already been registered.

But don't despair, there are still millions of  two and three word combinations available for registration. The same rules still apply. Keep the words short, keep them easy to spell and visualize, and in turn they will become easily memorable for your customers.

3 comments:

  1. Shorter domain names are easier to remember, easier to type and far less susceptible to mistakes.It’s very convenient to have a short domain name and people tend to return to such websites more frequently.Short domain names between one and seven characters (without extension) have many advantages.
    1.Better for branding and adverts.
    2.Memorable: Short domains or often easier to remember.
    3.Loyal users enjoy short name since it’s quick to type.
    4.Easier to attract direct traffic or type-in traffic as they also call it.
    5.Allow longer sub-directories to be shown in Adverts and highlighted in search engine results.
    6.Keep their value or increase because of scarcity and high desire among domain investors to own them.
    7.Your attention span is often short while browsing the web. Short domains take less time to read.
    8.Likely to be considered generic letters and not offend any other parties or trademark owners.
    There are many online vendor available for checking the availability of short domain registration like Tucktail.com ,also you can register an available domain from them..

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  2. You are prepared to begin your own web business. How would you enroll a domain? What would you be able to do with your domain name once you have one? Shouldn't something be said about web facilitating? Domain register

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