Choosing a Domain for your Website

What you choose to be your website's domain is very important. Having a quality domain will make your website much easier to find in a Google search, and easier to remember and navigate to directly via the address bar. So how do you make sure that your domain name is ideal? We have collected some tips to help you chose a top tier domain name!

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Guidelines for Choosing your Domain Name

• Make sure it’s reasonably short as it should be easy for people to read, memorize and type. Think about the domains of your favorite websites, chances are the vast majority are shorter than 15 characters.
• Try not to add any non-letter characters such as numbers or hyphens, as these make your domain harder to remember and tend to look less professional.
• Your domain should be a descriptor of your website. This will make your website easier to find and make your target market more likely to view your website.
• If you are deciding on a domain for a business or other organization’s website, you should try to approximate the business’s name.
• For a personal website, you should probably use your own name or some variation of it.
• Blogs can also be your personal name, or you can come up with a creative separate name for your blog. Learn more about starting a blog here.
• Make sure the domain you pick is available. You can do this on GoDaddy to determine whether your desired domain is available.
• Choose an appropriate domain extension. For example, if you’re a nonprofit, you might want to use .org. Certain domain extensions such as .gov and .uk are restricted and only usable by organizations that qualify. While most of us are familiar with common extensions such as .com, .org, and .net, there are many hundreds of more obscure extensions such as .info, .construction, and .download. These less familiar domains are oftentimes less desirable, but can be useful in niche circumstances.

Try brainstorming potential ideas for your domain. If you're having trouble coming up with good candidates, you can try out a domain generator such as Lean Domain Search, which will generate a variety of keywords and attach them to a keyword you enter. Once you have some decent candidates, compare them and see how well each of them matches the above criteria.

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Registering your Domain

To register a custom domain, go to godaddy.com and enter the domain you’d like. If that domain is available, GoDaddy will then provide you with a price for that domain. If it is not available, GoDaddy will provide a list of similar domains. You can also sort results by domain extension (e.g. .com, .org) if you have a preference for particular extensions. Domains are usually inexpensive, with many costing less than $10. However, popular domains can cost thousands of dollars! If your first choice domain turns out to cost more than you can afford, you can usually find a slightly different domain, or one with a different extension that is much cheaper.

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Managing your Website

Once you have chosen your domain name, you are ready to start building your site. You can easily create a website for free using Member.buzz!

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To learn more about the process of setting up your own custom domain on Member.buzz, see Custom Domains.