Branding

Selecting your Domain is just as Important as selecting your Business name, and undoubtedly you will experience the same problems as selecting a business name.

The domain name has been taken and registered by someone else or parked(bought and not being used). Should the selected domain name be parked then it will be possible to purchase the domain from the owner, depending on how valuable the domain is to both yourself and the owner then the price may be considerable and the best option would be to select a variant of the name.

To determine the owner use www.mywebname.com.au/whois.php

Selecting alternative Domain name

All is not lost and you can in most instances add a prefix to the domain name eg rather than register www.bluewidgets.com.au, you can select www.mybluewidgets.com.au, rather than selecting housecleaning.com.au select greenhousecleaning.com.au

Domain Name Hyphenation

Do not be tempted to use hyphenation to separate out the words, as this firstly makes it difficult to explain to a potential customer your web address, next it is difficult to type in and lastly Google is able to separate out words even when they are concatenated together making it possible to identify keywords. Do not use underscore and never use spaces in web page names.

Domain Name Selection Resources

Next…….Keyword Selection in Domain names