Domain name - Definition, tips and examples

What is a domain name on the Internet?

The definition for an Internet domain name is an identification network associated with a group of devices or equipment connected to the Internet network.

On the other hand:

The domain name will be the brand with which you represent yourself in the network. Choosing lightly can bring future failures in the promotion strategy of a site.

One of the first decisions that are taken when developing a Web project is to choose an appropriate name for the website.

To do this you must think in certain factors that will make the page is always in the "shortlist" of your potential customers.

The article talks about:

Tips for choosing a domain name

To choose a name you must comply with the following elements:

• Short: If it is possible one word, two or three at the most
• Memorizable: in the sense of "easy to remember"
• Related to the content of the Web: it is obvious, but sometimes a name can get attention and then have nothing to do with the Web. The idea is that it relates as much as possible to the site.
• Keywords that refer to the content: at least, that contains one, the most important

Choosing the domain name well is essential, if it is well selected it can be easily remembered and get many advantages:

• Visitors can easily return to the site with just a short and simple URL introduction
• It promotes the image of the product, service or company on the Internet and gives it an additional value
• The Web has a name comparable to that of other large companies and projects on the Internet, since it is completely related to the content of the site
• When you see a URL in the search engines which the name of the domain is exactly the text you looked for, it is thought, at first, that is a page with a lot of information of the searched topic or that the Website is an institutional website

Recommendations for the domain name

Choosing the right name for a Website is a process similar to creating the name of a brand. You must start understanding your company or project perfectly.

• Who is the target audience?
• What is the purpose of the Website?
• What has your site that does not have the competition?
• What is the vision and mission of the project online?

To eliminate non viable alternatives of domain names, the following recommendations are shown:

Length of a domain Long or short?

Even though many domain registration portals allow a maximum of 63 characters, do not try to get the name to approach such a length. As a good brand, a domain name should be easy to remember.

For this reason, short domains work better than long domains.

Also, the longer a domain is, the more likely it is that an error will occur while a potential client writes it.

Try to choose the shortest domain name that your customers and visitors could associate with your business. It is advised that the name be below seven characters if possible.

There are long names that can be remembered easily, but are usually represented by simple and easy to memorize phrases. For example, a domain name like "www.entrepreneurwomen.com" is long, but easily remembered.

Expressions to improve positioning

The domain name can become an ally when it comes to placing your website in the rank top on search engines.

The algorithms of the search engines take into account (in addition to other factors) the name to place a certain page in the ranking of the results.

For example, if you dedicate yourself to selling socks for diabetics and the name is "www.diabeticsocks.com“, this will add one more point for your website to be listed at the top of the search engines for the search phrase "diabetic socks"

They only have one domain so you can compete strongly for a single key search concept.

Analyze which expression best summarizes your activity and test if you can place it as a domain name.

Characters not recommended for a domain name

There are certain appellations that despite they are short they are also difficult to remember because the combination of letters is not familiar to the vocabulary of potential customers.

For example, "www.pwxtw.com" is short, but very difficult to remember since it contains a combination of little used letters in our vocabulary.

It is also convenient to avoid numbers in the domain

Whenever you have to say it orally, you will have to specify if you mean the number or the word.

For example, if you have the domain "www.disscount12.com" will have to specify whether it refers to "www.disscount12.com or" www.disscounttwelve.com.

Also recommended to not use scripts and low medium

It is easy to forget the scripts and also difficult to remember what type of script it is in. It is also cumbersome to read or dictate a domain with several scripts.

Avoid abbreviations

The use of any mode of contraction in a domain is not recommended and difficult to relate to your business or specific activity, try typing in the keyboard the name of the domain that you previously chose, analyze if it is easy to type and that there is no chance of making a mistake while writing it, and try to read it aloud and analyze if It's easy to memorize it.

How to find the right extension:

.com, .net, .mx, .org, .info?

.com domains are the easiest to remember and most used by Internet users. If you can not register the .com extension, there is the .net extension that is also easy to learn.

In the case that the scope of your business only covers one country, it is also recommended to opt for domains with regional extension, for example .com.mx

At the level of search engines, having an extension of a given country causes the portal to exit in better positions for geolocated searches.

Other recommendations to choose a domain name

If your domain name is difficult to write, register the domain names related to the typical errors that are committed when you type the name of your portal.

It redirects the additional domains to the main domain and in this way assures you that those Internet users who write with slight errors arrive at your Web site.

An Internet domain name is a base name that groups together a set of computers or devices.

They allow you to provide names that can be easily remembered instead of a numeric IP address.

It enables any network service to be located in a different place in the Internet topology even if it has a different IP address.

Technically, it is a mnemonic resource that is associated with nodes of the Internet network in order to facilitate its identification, consisting of alphanumeric expressions concatenated in several levels organized in a hierarchical manner.

Each domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD by TOP Level Domain), which is always either one of a small list of generic names (three or more characters), or a two-character territorial code based on the ISO-3166.

For example, a domain for Mexico ends in .mx which is the country code top-level domain assigned by the IANA (Internet Number Assignment Authority) for the country.

The choice of a domain name is a very important step when creating a website, whether it is a blog or a company website.

It is not something that should be taken lightly because it can depend on the ease with which the site is found, its Pagerank (value assigned by Google based on the quality and age of the website) and even its positioning as a brand.