Why shouldn’t I just register a brand new domain name?
This is one of the most common questions we get at TheNameStore.com.
15 years ago, this would have been a viable option, but not today. An entire industry has sprouted up around the domain name industry, and you’re up against an army of researchers trying to find and register good domain names in the more valuable TLDs.
A good domain name has a clear meaning — it doesn’t contain numbers, hypens, or abbreviations — just your main keywords or your company name. It doesn’t start with ‘best’ or ‘great’ or ‘my’, and it doesn’t end with ‘4you’. Nobody will remember your domain name, so they won’t be able to come back to your site or tell others about it.
There are some exceptions, of course. If you have an unlimited budget, you can create a brand from a wacky or silly name such as ‘Google’.
You’re building a web site because you WANT people to find you. That usually means putting a great deal of effort into search engine listings. Avoiding abbreviations not only helps humans remember you, but it helps search engines list you as well. They don’t know that ‘ABCMgmt’ is the same as ‘ABCManagement’. Real words index better.
In a new twist, Google and other search engines have announced that they look at a domain’s creation date when deciding how highly to rank a web site. If you buy a new domain name, your site automaticaly gets lower rankings for a couple of years. When you buy a domain name from a reseller the creation date doesn’t change, so you’ll get a ratings boost from day 1!