Choosing a domain should be treated as seriously as choosing a company name. It will identify your brand on the Web and, if positioned correctly, will become as important an element as a logo, font or corporate color.
But today , choosing a domain name is not an easy task. According to the Internet Live Stats project, which collects and analyzes statistical information about the Internet, as of April 2019, 1.68 billion sites are online. And each of them has a web address, which the founder of the site tried to make as easy as possible to remember and write.
Fortunately, we know a few secrets that will help you choose the right domain without spending a lot of time. We will reveal them in this article.
How to choose a domain zone
There are four domain zones: national, regional, international, thematic.
National is intended to indicate that the site belongs to a country. For example, .ua hosts resources related to Ukraine, .eu — to the European Union, and .jo — to Jordan. Some national domains, due to their resonance with abbreviations or words, are now popular outside the country for which they were created. For example, .tv, which originally indicated that an online resource belonged to the Polynesian state of Tuvalu, is now used for the addresses of television companies' sites.
Regional is similar to national, but it is intended to indicate that the site belongs not to a country, but to a city or region:
.kiev.ua – sites related to Kyiv or the Kyiv region;
.vinnica.ua – to Vinnytsia or Vinnytsia region,
.kh.ua - to Kharkiv or Kharkiv region.
International is intended for sites whose audience will consist of representatives of different countries. Initially, it was used to define specific types of organizations. For example, commercial companies registered .com, and non-commercial companies registered .org. Currently, the international zone is used without restrictions regarding the type of company.
Thematic is intended to emphasize the theme of the site or the type of activity of the company. For example, in the .tattoo zone, sites of tattoo salons or portfolios of tattoo artists are created.
Take a look at the themed area if:
- do not want to position the company as being related to a specific country or region;
- want to attract the attention of users — the thematic zone became popular about five years ago and still arouses interest among Internet users;
- the invented name is used in the national, regional and international zones.
Choose a zone depending on the region and topic of the blog, online store or portal. Yes, if you are thinking about which domain to choose for a site that will be visited by users from different countries, pay attention to the international or thematic zone. If you plan to sell goods only on the territory of Ukraine, register.ua, .com.ua, .co.ua or .biz.ua.
How to choose a domain for a site of any topic that offers goods or services within one region (town or region)? For example, these can be service stations or a city forum. Of course, choose a regional domain - it will tell Internet users and search engines your location.
How to choose a website domain name
And now more about how to choose a site domain and about the secrets that were mentioned at the beginning of the article.
Make sure the domain name does not include a registered trademark name. If you want to create an information site where you will talk about how to promote a brand on Facebook, we do not recommend choosing an address like facebook-promotion.com. After all, using the name of a social network for such purposes is prohibited, and if you ignore this prohibition, you risk losing not only your web address, but also money for lawyers and fines.
Do not use numbers or hyphens. It is difficult for a person who hears a number in a web address to understand how to enter it in the address bar of the browser. And instead of 1-club.ua, it will print odynclub.ua or odyn-club.ua.
Choose domains that are both spelled and pronounced. It is not easy to understand how to enter a URL in the browser that is dictated as "new time top" - novyychas.top, novyjchas.top or novyichas.top. But with the web address, which is pronounced as "chas top", there are no such misunderstandings, because the input option is the only one - chas.top.
Use keywords. This secret will help future visitors and search engines to understand the subject of the site. For example, looking at the web address RemontSumok.ua, it becomes clear that the company repairs bags.
The domain must be short. Entering a long web address takes a lot of time, it is more difficult to remember, and there is a greater risk of making a mistake.
It should be understood that the domain of the site is not equal to the site itself, for the operation of the Internet resource you must also rent a place to host your site's files. Thus, it turns out that your site is a domain + hosting (placement). The files of your site will be stored on the servers of the hosting companies. For example, at CityHost you can order hosting in Germany or Ukraine - depending on the target audience of the Internet project.
What characters to use in domain names
You can use Latin letters, numbers and hyphens in the site name. At the same time, a hyphen cannot be the first or last character. But, as we already wrote above, the use of numbers and hyphens can make it difficult to remember and correctly perceive the name by ear. It is much more organic when the name consists only of letters.
Cyrillic can also be used in some domain zones. Cyrillic web addresses have both advantages and disadvantages, which we recommend that you familiarize yourself with.
Advantages of Cyrillic URLs:
- Easy to read, write, remember. In addition, such URLs look beautiful as part of visual elements of online and offline advertising.
- Many unoccupied addresses. For example, travel.ukr, code.ukr, dollar.ukr are still available for registration at the time of publication of this article.
- Do not impair search promotion.
Disadvantages of Cyrillic URLs:
- The difficulty of typing from a keyboard without a Ukrainian layout.
- Encoding problems. Since online services mostly only work correctly with URLs written in Latin letters, they convert Cyrillic to Latin-compatible encoding. As a result, the beautiful name CityHost.ukr turns into xn--n1afbccp1jb.xn--j1amh. The second option will have to be used everywhere when working with the site, including when configuring the robots.txt file. This slows down development, causes a lot of inconvenience.
- Non-Latin URLs cause surprise among foreign users. Therefore, the audience of sites with such web addresses is reduced to users who understand Cyrillic.
Should I order a domain and hosting from the same hoster?
Ordering a domain name and renting a server from different hosting companies in some cases helps to save some money. For example, when one hoster launches a promotion with discounts on the purchase of hosting, and the second - on domain registration. But for saving money, you will have to pay for the time spent on setting up DNS servers, as well as for constant jumping from the hosting administration to the domain administration.
It is more practical to buy a domain and hosting from the same hosting company. For example, you will not need to spend time to "bind" the web address with the server - this will happen automatically. In addition, if questions about hosting and web addresses arise at the same time, you will get answers to them by contacting only one hoster consultant.
Now that you have read this article, you will easily come up with a website domain and not spend a lot of time on it. And if you take into account all our recommendations, your web address will be easy to read and remember, and will not cause any questions from search robots.
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