As an online marketer, I am constantly approached by people who have a great idea for their small business, but terrible ideas on how to establish themselves online. Usually, a good business owner will have the energy, resources, and drive to take their business online, but they lack one key element. Experience.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

At this point many businees owners try to take their online marketing efforts into their own hands an the result is something similar to a high school science student testing out his home made jet pack…disaster. Everybody has been to that website. There is often blinking text, annoying animated graphics, and a picture of some creepy guy posing for the camera with a mullet (feel free to check out this website if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

So, as a favor to all small business owners who would like to take that very first step of buying a domain name for their website, I have compiled a list of rules to follow. Hopefully, this will prevent colleagues from performing the infamous “facepalm” gesture (as seen above) when you tell them the name of your “awesome” new site.

1. Short is Better

I promised “rules” so here they are. Try to keep the url at 3 words or less, but more importantly, I usually say 5 syllables or less. Despite the fact that your website or blog lives on a computer, mere humans eventually will utter is name. If you thought ReallyGreatDiscountCowboyFurniture.com was a good idea for your site’s name, think again. With domain names, less is more. Even less is even more.

Envoca.com is better than EnvocaDesign.com. Why go shorter? It leaves less room for a spelling error and frankly people are lazy. Plus, you can always go buy up those variations or your domain name and just have them redirect to your shorter url.

2. Keywords Are a Want, Not a Need

In the early days of SEO (mid to late 90’s) search engines placed a lot of imortance on the keywords in your site’s URL. StevesKnives.com always ranked better than StevesCutlery.com for the keyword “knives”. Today, this is not so much the case. Sure, Google will often favor exact matches on a domain name but having a website address of http://www.KeywordKeywordKeyword.com just doesn’t help as much as it used to. Therefore the rule is, “If you can fit keywords into your domain name for the site then great, if not, no big deal.” Try googling the phrase “shoe store“, you’ll see what I mean.

3. Avoid Hyphens

Once again, this rule comes back from the 90’s. Back in the day, when having a keyword in your address meant a lot, spammers took hyphens to the extreme. For spammers, not only would you set up KeywordKeywordKeyword.com, but also Keyword-Keyword-Keyword.com, and Keyword-KeywordKeyword.com. You get the idea. The reason real websites generally didn’t use hyphens at the time was because of website users.

For example, when you give someone your phone number you don’t say “five zero three dash four eight one dash…” You just say the numbers. Well, people do the same thing with websites. If you own a website at Great-Scooters.com and someone tells a friend about it, they will almost always go to GreatScooters.com, find that there is no website (or a competitors website), and you will lose business.

4. Stick to the .COMs

Unless you are a company outside the states your url should end in “.com”. Always. This rule is similar to the hyphen rule in the sense that when someone says “CoolSite.net” the second party almost always goes home and types “CoolSite.com”. The only businesses that can break this rule are the cutting edge tech websites that employ domain hacks such as del.icio.us, whom by the way, also uses delicious.com. Tech websites often have a user demographic narrow enough that they can get away with this sort of thing but your average online business does not.

5. Forget Acronyms

This rule comes down to an issue of branding. If your car dealership’s name is “Super Duper Discount Dodges”, do not try to get people to go to SDDD.com. At face value it has absolutely nothing to do with your brand. The exception to this rule is if your company name is “The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” but your brand is know as “ESPN”, then that would be the case where you should set up ESPN.com. Aside from that, finding .COM domain names with 4 letter or less that are still available is almost impossible these days.

6. Shamelessly Push Your Brand

If you have put any effort into developing your brand up until this point, then now is the time to push it. Generally speaking, CorporateSuiteShoppe.com always gets more traffic and makes more sales than SuitesForLease.com. Brands that do well offline will always do better online if they use their brand to their advantage. Experience tells us that this is true more and more.

So, hopefully this has been helpful to anyone trying to venture out into the world of online marketing. If you have any specific questions as to what you should call your future website, feel free to contact us online here, or you can find me on twitter as @garrettgillas.

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