5 tips to consider when creating your domain name

1. What’s in a [domain] name?
5 tips to consider when creating your domain name

2. Count your characters
• Search engines will display
approximately 70 characters (or
512px)
• Try to keep your domain name
below 20 characters in length in
order to ensure that at least the
domain root and 1st subfolder
display in SERPs.

3. Leave out the “the”
• It’s tempting to add “the” to the
beginning of your domain for flow and
style (ex. “theromeodiaries”), however
consider how you’ll relay the domain to
others verbally and whether or not users
will remember the “the” at the beginning
of your domain.
• Instead of adding the “the” to your
domain, incorporate it in other aspects of
the design of your site and/or logo
Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of
Take all myself.
thee

4. Avoid Hyphens
• A hyphen is not ideal when
communicating your URL verbally to
users, but hyphenated domains also
have a long standing history of being
considered “spammy” so much so that
it is widely speculated that search
engines consider the amount of
hyphens in a URL when ranking pages

5. Make it easy to read & spell
• Again, consider how you’ll verbally
communicate the URL to users and also
how the words will read once written or
typed.
• For example, the sentence “S is For”
makes senses when said out loud but in a
URL sisfor.com could read as “sis for” and
when verbally read, users could
misconstrue “for” for “4”
Romeoandjuliet.com

6. Choose .com or a ccTLD
• If your business operates within one
location specifically (ex. Pizza restaurant,
boutique retail store, etc.) then you may
want to consider a ccTLD (country code
top level domain) to capitalize on geo-
targeted searches. However, if you’re not
after a specific geography, stick with
“.com” for your generic top-level domain.
While Google announced officially that it
does not favor one gTLD over the over on
its webmaster forum in July 2015, it is
still widely speculated that “.com”s are
favored in search rankings.

7. Fin.
Leisurelychic.com