Website Platter

If you are planning to work from home by starting up a home business, you will undoubtedly need a website. So what should you choose as your domain name?

Over the past fifteen years, the our lives have become more and more intertwined with the Internet. It is just a given that businesses are expected to have a website, even if they have multiple physical locations. When it comes to selecting the proper domain name for a home business, opinions have been varied. The strategies surrounding domain selection depend immensely upon what you wish to accomplish with your business. For instance, domains are often selected for their advantages in search engine rankings, company branding, or for how they describe a general term. Factors which always need to be taken into account are the length of your domain, how easy it is to say and remember, as well as similar existing domains with different extensions. For example, if your business were to offer the best deals on clothing, you would not want to name the website bestbuy.org, because everyone would assume that you were selling electronics. Of course, this domain is not available.

Below, we will examine three of the dominant rationals which have been utilized in domain selection.

1) Domains For Search Engine Placement

As mentioned above, domain names are often strategically selected for high search engine rankings. This is done by ensuring that the domain name contains a keyword for which the owner wishes their website to rank in the search engines. The problem is that keyword domains are usually not brandable to a business, and are generally used to funnel traffic to a primary website. For instance, the business which sells green calculators would benefit from reserving the domains green-calculators.com and greencalculators.com. The reason is twofold. One, it is easy to remember, and two, the owner of these domains is going to rank very high in the search engines for the key phrase, “green calculators”.

2) Domains For Branding

When moving from the offline office, to the online work from home setting, the conventional mode of thought is that you should take the offline brand name and attach a .com or a .country onto the end. Country extensions are taken advantage of in regions of the world where there is more interest in the website in the specific country, as opposed to worldwide. In the event that you did not have a brand prior to considering an online business, you have the opportunity to be imaginative when coming up with your domain name. Just remember that there are literally millions of domains which have been registered prior to yours. Therefore, expect a few of the domains which you have come up with to be already taken. Nonetheless, the common school of thought among the experts, is that shorter domains are more desirable. The ideal length is five letters for branding purposes. However, you have to make sure that the domain can be spoken as well. For example, ltttm.com is not a good domain name because it is both difficult to say and remember.

3) Domains Which Utilize General Terms

Before the (dot) com crash, businesses would flock towards general term domains. However, the (dot) com crash resulted in many of these companies who utilized general term domains going out of business. Companies which focused on branding refused to purchase general term domains due to the fact that they recognized the importance of branding. While such a strategy worked for many of these companies, allowing them to survive the (dot) com crash, general term domains still have some value, and should not be summarily dismissed. Similar to keyword domains, which attract visitors by achieving high rankings in the search engines, so do general term domains. Thus, general term domains still hold a lot of value, and continue to rise in importance. With that being said, what we can learn from the (dot) com crash, is that general term domains are not all that it takes to run a successful online business. Rather, there are a myriad of factors which lead to the success of an online business.

Thus, prior to taking action to work from home with a home business, make sure that you take a good amount of time to compose a list of possible domain names. Keep what you have read here at the front of your mind, and decide which factors are most important to the success of your home business.

To successfully Work From Home it is best that you have your own website for your Home Business. Just make sure that you put a lot of thought into your domain selection. Also, visit us at SOSComplete.com