Domain Names - Thinking Outside The Domain Tool Box
It came in my email a few days ago. “Try this super duper domain name choosing tool! It is the key to all your domain choosing needs! It will wash your windows walk your dog, mow your lawn, etc. etc.” Enough already! I tried the tool, I typed a keyword into the box. It regurgitated a series of hyphenated strings of words which in reality, would not work by any stretch of the imagination.
You can do better! With a little creative thinking and some word play, you can come up with a much more human sounding and workable domain name. So, how do you choose a domain name?
I would say, to look for something related to whatever business or idea you are trying to promote, of course. If you can match up the domain name, the business name, and have something that will provide a good title tag for the browser, and fit the keywords and content well, you must be super man, but it can be done.
1. Get a concept, an idea of what you want the domain to say. Is it going to be a local business? If so, use your city name, or something from your area. The city I live in is in an area known for rose growing. It is commonly called “Rose City.” If I wanted to start an electronics business, I might look up the domain name “Rosecityeloctronics” or Mycityelectronics.
2. Play with concepts related to your business. If I owned a trenching company, I would think about what we do in that job. We trench, we dig, we dig digging, how about wedigdigging.com, or digdigging.com
I enjoy playing with words, and coming up with new catch phrases. This is one example: In the process of having some magnetic signs made for my brick and mortar business, I realized that to get everything I wanted on the sign, and still have lettering large enough to be visible to people in other vehicles, I was going to have to cut the text a little bit. I wanted something like: “Outdoor Pest Solutions, We Can Help, Even if Your Lawn Is a lake!” to emphasize that we don’t just handle lawn pests, but also rogue vegetation in lakes and ponds. I also wanted to use some phrases such as “bugs and weeds,” Which many people use to locate a pest control service. I played with the idea a little bit, and came up with the phrase, “Outdoor Pest Solutions, From Lawns To Lakes”, and then shortened this to, “Outdoor pest solutions, Lawns to Lakes.” I added in the phrase “Bugs and Weeds” Even with this addition, this cut the whole thing down to a usable level. It came out like this:
Line 1. Outdoor Pest Solutions.
Line 2. Bugs and Weeds.
Line 3. Lawns to Lakes.
This reduced the original by about 10 spaces and even allowed for an extra phrase. I liked it enough that I wanted to standardize it and make it a part of my “branding”, so I decided it would be wise to get domain names for each phrase. So I now have; lawnstolakes.com, bugsandweeds.com and outdoorpestsolutions.com to stop poachers and encroachers. Any of these would make a dandy URL for a website of this type. That is a long way around to this: Use a little creativity on your own, and I am sure you can come up with something better for your house painting company than best_house_painter_on_earth.com. Just play with the words, and look at it from different angles. Think about what your users would type to search for your type of business.
3. Go to a “who is” type tool, and start entering things that are directly related to a concept that you want to use. This let’s you see if the name is taken, if it is, start again. Sometimes in the process of doing this, something will pop out at you, very often it is something better than you started with.
4. Ask yourself, “What would my potential customers type into the search box?” Will it be a technical term, will it be a common name term? Sometimes we get caught up in the technical jargon of our occupations, and don’t realize that the people we serve won’t understand the terminology that we use to communicate with others in our industry. We have to try to think like a customer. That would be a good idea anyway. It would help us to serve them better. Maybe we could even do the same thing with our website design and contact information.
J. Frank Burns blogs about domain names, and Internet related social issues and environmental issues from a different perspective.
Tags: content, domain choosing tools, domain names, domains, keywords, magnetic signs, title tag
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