Posted on on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 10:53 am.
When starting a business, or taking your business online for the first time, choosing the correct domain name(s) is paramount. I have spoken to a lot of businesses about how frustrating it can be to be stuck with a domain name that is too established to overhaul. Choosing a domain name can have a massive implication on your web site’s professionalism, search engine rankings and your general web site marketing.
Options That Are Available
To businesses in the UK, there are a huge variety of domain names that are made available for you to purchase. These range from .com, .co.uk, .org, .net, .org.uk, .me.uk, .biz, .eu, .me, .info and .tv just to name a few. Most people, when looking for a suitable domain name for their company, fall into the trap of having to choose a substitute because the domain name that they want ( .co.uk or .com ) is already registered.
My Recommendation
In all likelihood the ideal domain name that you would like for your web-site is going to be taken. Therefore, a suitable substitute has to be adopted. If for example you start a company called ‘Creare’ in the uk, you would be looking for a domains name like ‘www.creare.co.uk’ and ‘www.creare.com’. Obviously, both are taken. Most domain name companies will then show you a list of suitable domain names that are available to buy instead (They don’t want to lose a sale!).
These subsitute domain names could be things like ‘creare.me.uk’ or ‘crearedesign.co.uk’ for example. What mistake some people make is go for the shorter, ‘creare.me.uk’ domain name over the ‘crearedesign.co.uk’ domain name.
Firstly, in my opinion, if you are a UK company, you want a .co.uk domain name. Regardless. Getting yourself a suitable .co.uk should be your first priority and then I would recommend also getting the .com as a ‘forwarder’ if it is available. Purchasing the .co.uk domain name will serve you better in the major search engines like Google. Lesser TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .me.uk, .org.uk tend to not rank as prominently in search engines unlike the UK pedigree .co.uk extension.
Domain Name selection for SEO
The other important factor to consider when choosing domain names is if they contain keyword(s). When Creare was started, www.creare.co.uk was unavailable, already registered. Because the company was legally trading as ‘Creare Design Ltd’ the directors chose the substitute ‘www.crearedesign.co.uk’. At the time, the company considered this a disappointment. However, because the domain features the companies’ main keyword ‘design‘, the www.crearedesign.co.uk domain name is working better than www.creare.co.uk would have.
Because we target design related phrases in search engines like ‘web design‘ and ‘website design‘, the fact that our domain name contains the word ‘design’ contributes to our rankings significantly. In conclusion to the topic of this email, my advice and recommendation for purchasing domain names can be summarised in the following priority:
- If you are based in the UK, purchase a .co.uk domain to host your site on.
- If available, purchase the .com and forward the domain name to the .co.uk.
- Purchase the shortest domain possible, this will help with your marketing, branding etc.
- Purchase a domain name that contains your main keyword(s). e.g www.crearedesign.co.uk
- Purchase your domain name from a reputable UK company.
Channel
Available Domain Names
on May 22nd, 2009 Says:
[...] Advice On Buying Domain Names [...]
on June 6th, 2009 Says:
we have a suitable domain name, which includes our field and location, we have a good landing page, we get 100+ hits perday but these dont convert into sales?!?!?
on June 8th, 2009 Says:
Hi Mr Edwards, thank you for your question. Having looked at your web-site there are several areas for improvement regarding the internal ‘optimisation’ of your homepage. To name a few:
Why not give us a call today to discuss this in more detail.
on March 10th, 2010 Says:
Hi guys
Good blog really like it, you can see my domain name I am targeting ‘chinese lanterns’ as the keyword, so does my domain suck because it contains the – between lanterns and uk. I didnt have many options, how will this effect my SEO.
Please email me and I may look into a few other services but I could do with this being answered first.
on March 11th, 2010 Says:
Hi Carl, thanks for your comment. To be honest, your domain name is reasonably fair. Ideally chineselanterns.co.uk or chinese-lanterns.co.uk would have been perfect, but these are obviously taken.
When you can’t register the perfect domain, the best advice is to keep it as short as possible. How are you branding up your new Magento eCommerce site? Are you calling the company ‘Chinese Lanterns UK’ or have you got another brand in mind?
If for example, if my company was called ‘Koi Chinese Lanterns’ I would probably seek a domain name like koichineselanters.co.uk or even koi-lanters.co.uk
Having just one keyword in your domain name can be just as effect as having both. If you take our website for example, we rank highly for ‘web design’ although the word ‘web’ doesn’t appear in our domain name.
Thanks Carl.