Your Domain Name

by David Rockman (Marketing Consultant)

Your domain name is imperative to the success of your website, if anyone tells you otherwise they're either lying or don't know what they're talking about. You need a domain name if you're serious about being an online entity; it's where you'll direct all your potential customers. For them to become customers you've to make a good first impression and having your own domain name rather than some address that's long and cumbersome will enable you to do this.

There are lots of other benefits of having your own domain, here's just a few of them.

A domain name is your own unique identity and always will be as long has you continue to use that name. A domain name allows you to promote your business simply by giving out your domain name or placing your domain name on all of your marketing material.

You can promote your website instead of someone else's when you're sending emails as your domain name will be in the email address, for example admin@gymlink.comis helping to promote gymlink while admin@bigpond.com is helping to promote and brand Bigpond.

Your likely to have more traffic to your website with your own domain name because more people will be returning as they can remember your address. A domain name is just as important to your business these days.

Domain names are so cheap nowadays that there's no excuse for not having one. Now that you’re ready to get yourself a domain name here's some pointers to help you choose a good one.

Size does matter
In the case of domain names the smaller the better. Of course short domain names are harder to find but if you can find one it has a number of advantages such as, it's easier to brand, easier to remember and it's harder to misspell.

Easy to remember
Try to get a name that's easy to remember and sounds good. General words are best for this but since these are all gone at this stage you should look for non general names or combinations of general names which rhyme and sound good together.

Relate to your business
If you use keywords which are related to your business industry you will help your search engine rankings. What's even better is if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your domain name, this way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.

Avoid similarities
This means you should avoid choosing domain names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these people could end up on your competitors site rather than yours because they got confused over the two domain names.

com.au is best
You should always aim for the .com.au version of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar, if you register .tv or .net or any of the other available extensions and your competition has the .com.au version then you've just lost a potential customer.

How to Register a Domain Name
Visit Gymlink Domains to search available domain names. Once you know that your name is available follow the prompts until your have secured the name you want. If you want assistance please contact GymLink Domains on 1300 854 991.