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!

If you were opening a restaurant, you would likely choose a location that’s easy to see, not hidden by trees or hills, and near major streets so customers can find you easily and remember how to get to you.

On the internet, a domain name that uses a few whole words (not abbreviations) serves the same purpose.

You’re going to invest some time and money creating your web site and advertising it so others can find it for years to come, just as you would spend time and money on construction of your building.  It’s pretty hard to move a building once it’s built, and it’s almost as hard to move a web site.  The worst part is that your customers will continue to go to the old location, even after you’ve moved.

Search engine listings, bookmarks, and links from other web sites usually take months or years to find the new location when a web site moves to a new domain name.

Investing in a good domain name UP FRONT prevents you from having to move your web site later, and losing customers in the transition.

For example, if you go the domain name “Horses.com”, you’ll probably find information about horses. 

All domain names have at least 2 parts, separated by a dot.  The part of the domain name to the right of the dot is called the Top Level Domain (TLD).  In the 1990’s there were only 5 TLDs,  and each had a special meaning:

• .COM - Commercial use, such as a company brochure
• .NET - Networking, such as an internet service provider
• .ORG - Organizations, generally non-profit.
• .MIL - Military, such as a Navy recruiting site
• .EDU - Education, such as university web site
• .GOV - Government use, such as IRS.gov

More TLDs are now available - We’ll discuss those in a later post.

Domain names are often compared to real estate, where the name itself is the property, and the web site is the building built upon it.

Domain names are also used to route email, and most modern companies issue email addresses to their employees with the company domain name to make it clear that this person represents the company and is doing company business.

 My name is Dale, and I’m the founder of TheNameStore.com.  My company has been buying and selling domain names for several years, and we’re one of the top resellers of premium domain names.  We’re based in San Diego, California.

The purpose of this blog is to help people understand the process of selecting, evaluating, and purchasing a domain name for their new web site.  This blog is not intended as a discussion area for the reseller business, but rather to help those who need a premium domain name or two and want to know how to get up and running quickly. 

I also get a lot of questions about domain name issues from customers, and I’ll share what I know in this blog.

If you’ve purchased domains before and wonder why we do things a bit differently at TheNameStore.com, I’ll be sharing some of our secrets here, so bookmark this site and keep coming back.  I’ll do my best to make this site worth visiting on a regular basis.