Every website needs a domain name. You should take time and choose a domain name that best represents the purpose of your website. It takes the following form: http://www.scratchprogramming.org. It consists of two parts, the name and the extension, scratchprogramming is the name, .org is the extension. More popular extensions are .com, .org, .ca, .net. Less popular extensions include .info, biz, .tv
Google calculates a value for each website it adds to its collection of websites. The higher the value of your website, the higher your site will rank when a Google search is done. If you choose an informative domain name, Google can better determine what your website is about.
Tips
Legitimacy: It is better to choose a domain with a more popular extension, like .com, .net, .org or .ca. People are more familiar, comfortable with the more popular extensions. People are not so comfortable with a .tv extension.
Syntax: Avoid a domain name with hyphens in it, for example: my-site.com. Some think that search engines like google will rank your site lower if it has hyphens in the name. Fewer characters are more memorable, for example, jts.name Avoid names with numbers in it, unless it is part of your brand name like 411.ca.
Strategy
There are two strategies for choosing a domain name:
- SEO Strategy: Choose a domain name based on popular keyword search terms.
- Branding Strategy: Develop a brand name like Twitter.
If you choose the SEO strategy then you will expect most of your visitors to find your website through a search engine like google. If you are expecting to receive traffic from social media, paid advertisements, and word of mouth then you can choose the branding strategy, which usually requires that you have money to spend to promote your brand.
As you can guess domain names that contain keywords which have high average monthly searches are in demand. Check out this video made by the google company on branded domain names vs keyword laden domain names.
If you are taking the SEO approach to choosing a domain name then it is a good idea to do some keyword research first. Here is how you can do it: