Last updated on April 25th, 2024 at 10:50 am
Choosing a Domain Name: How do you get to choose the right domain name?
What should you consider, and what are the benefits of choosing a specific domain name? These questions can be baffling even to an experienced domain internet nerd.
There are hundreds of domain name extensions that are in use today. Making a choice between different domain name extensions can be a hard call considering that there are hundreds of options to choose from.
We would want to explain to you a few factors to consider when choosing the perfect domain name.
Table of Contents
#1. Popularity
One of the most common trends in life is to go with what is popular. This is usually the case with domain names.
There are hundreds of domain name extensions that one can choose from but there are some that are very popular. The most preferred ones are the traditional Top Level Domains as opposed to the new domain name extensions. These include:
- .COM
- .ORG
- .NET
- .CO
- .US
The above domain names are the most popular and most people will identify them at first sight.
#2. Industry Specific
There are some Domain names that are specific to certain industries or professions. These help the associated websites to be identified as serving a certain industry.
There are hundreds of such domains and examples include
- .law
- .edu
- .engineering
- .blog
- .music
- .tv
#3. Geographic factors
Geography is important when it comes to domain names. This is because many times we are targeting people in a specific location and our websites are meant to serve people in certain locations.
This is not always the case but many times we need a domain that servers a specific location.
Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) is the most ideal for targeting a specific country.
A website with a .CO.ZA domain name would be targeting people from South Africa while a .KE targets people in Kenya. This works well for Search Engine Optimization and having such a geography-specific domain name can help you reach specific people.
Here is the list of all the ccTLDs for different countries.
There are also other regional specific domain names that are meant to serve people from a wider geographical location than just a single country. Examples of these include:
- .EU for Europe
- .AFRICA for Africa
#4. Availability
Getting a domain name is also a function of availability. You can only acquire a domain name if it is available.
In many cases, people start with a name in mind. This could be the registered business name or just a name with some special attachment such that we would want to use the name. If you find that the name is taken in most popular domain names, you have to choose a different domain extension or even buy the domain name from the one who has it.
Buying can be expensive. One of the most expensive domains ever sold is CarInsurance.Com which costs $49.7 million. Depending on who owns a domain name and the expected traffic which the domain can fetch, the cost of a domain name can vary greatly.
This leaves the best option for getting a suitable domain name is changing the domain extension depending on availability.
For example, if you are looking for a .com domain and you realize that it is not available, you could opt for a .CO.ZA domain or any other extension that has it available.