Characteristics of Good Domain Names

Domain Name acts as a foundation stone for any website or a web page. They are used in URLs for the identification of the specific web pages. Each and every domain name created is unique and is chosen with utmost care. Only 3 types of characters can be used in a domain: alphabets, numbers and (-).A Good Domain Name should be embedded with certain characteristics that will help them to be more promotional and easily accessible.

The characteristics that a good domain name must possess are:

• Simple and Short
• Easy to remember
• Easy to spell
• .com extension should be preferred
• Descriptive
• Brandable
• Avoid Hyphens or Numbers

• Simple and Short : An ideal domain name should be short. Your domain name should have minimum number of letters and words. If your domain name is below 10 letters, it will be more effective. To talk about words, lesser the words better is the domain name. One word is considered to be golden one, two-word domain a good one and beyond it is not a good idea. Eg. Orkut.com is a gold domain name.
• Easy to remember : If your domains names are easy to remember then they will be visited a more number of times as compared to some complicated domain names. It is not important that a small domain name will be easy to remember. People tend to learn simple names and this helps in promotion of a site.
• Easy to spell :While choosing a domain name special care should be laid on the spellings. Complicated spellings might confuse a user and might misspell it and land on some other site. Use of strange combination of words, foreign language words, difficult to pronounce words must be avoided.
• .com extension should be preferred : The extensions of domains denote the type of business they deal in. the most common extension are .net,. org, .edu and .com. The most popular extension is .com as it is instilled in the mind of the people. Most of the people type URL with .com attached. Using it makes your domain name more accessible.
• Descriptive : The domain name should be appealing as people mostly visit your site through direct links and search engines. People generally don't have time to remember the domain names they simply type the name related to their search. A descriptive name will provide the visitors with a fair idea about your site. Also if keywords are present in your domain name, it will mount up your site rankings on the search engines. Eg. Answers.com is a domain name that tells you about the site prior to your visit.
• Brandable : Brand name in site makes it appealing and accessible. A Brandable domain name might not be descriptive but yet its brand speaks of its content.
• Avoid Hyphens or Numbers : Use of hyphens and numbers should be avoided as people tend to forget them while typing a domain name. Numbers in the domain name are often confused with spelling. Eg. Red3.com can be confused with redthree.com.

If your domain name has the above characteristics then it is ought to be a popular and frequently visited domain. A good domain is the key to a successful website. So the next time, while choosing a domain name for your website, these points must be kept in mind.