What Exactly Is A Domain Name?

A domain name is your exclusive Web address, the unique name that identifies an Internet site, for example: http://www.heretohelpyou.com. A domain name, often referred to as a URL, is a key component of your website's identity and branding online.

Having a domain name builds credibility for your business. It makes your website seem more permanent. The long URL domain names (or sub domain names) that are offered free by many hosting companies are generally viewed as being cheap or of lesser quality. Plus, if you ever for any reason need to change your hosting service, your domain name will go with you, whereas your sub domain name does not.

A well-chosen domain name can help your website marketing efforts immensely. It can help communicate your website's core benefit and position your company against the competition. And the right domain name can even help you get ranked higher in the search engine listings.

A simple domain name is useful in advertisements because it can be memorable. Someone seeing a billboard with the domain www.fixmypipes.com may remember that name after they get home and on the computer, but you can be sure that they'll never remember the phone number 410-927-5312.

How do you choose a domain name for your website?

If customers or potential customers know your company, your business name is usually considered the number one pick for your domain name. People will generally try www.yourcompanyname.com first when searching for a commercial site. If it's difficult to spell, you may even want to register misspellings of it too. Choosing a domain name may not be as easy as this, particularly if you have a common name for your business. You can try adding hyphens (eg: www.your-company-name.com) or abbreviations of your company name, if your first choice is unavailable.

If your company name isn't well known by your community, which is true for most small businesses, you may choose a descriptive phrase related to the subject of your website as its domain name.

This will help search engines rank your site and increase the chances that someone seeing your listing will click your link. For example, if you were looking for potential names for a new puppy and one of your search engine results is a site with www.newpuppynames.com, what are the odds that you would click through to that site? Pretty high.

When conducting business in an international environment, .com domain names are usually considered the best. If you're only conducting business in one country, you can use country-specific endings like .ca. in Canada or .co.uk in the United Kingdom. There are other endings like .org, .net, .biz, etc., however when a person knows of your company they'll usually check .com.

Either way, keep your domain name simple, easy to remember, and related to the subject of your site.

We'll discuss the mechanics of buying and setting up a domain name in future articles. If you are subscribed to the Here to Help You do-it-yourself Website Builder, it's really simple.

Log into your site and click the "Manage Site" tab at the top of the page. Then choose "Domain". Type in your domain name and we'll see if it's available. If it is, click the "Get My Domain" button and it's done. We'll set it all up for you and do all the things you would normally have to do manually: We'll register the name for you, update the domain name servers (DNS), and change all your pages to reflect the new name.

If you want to use a name that you already own, it's not a problem. We'll lead you through the process step-by-step.

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