Does a domain name really matter?

Have a look on the list…

• Google
• Ebay
• WordPress
• Myspace
• FaceBook

You know them all very well, for sure! Was it name that you remembered or a brand? It’s name of course, and name is converted into a brand later. The question is, does it really matter to have best domain name. Yes it does!

Domain names matter, why?

A lousy domain name can be quite a nightmare. For example www.dicksonweb.com – I bet manufacturer of instruments for monitoring temperature, humidity and pressure Dickson wasn’t aware that www.DicksonWeb.com can be also read as www.DicksOnWeb.com! :D (the company website had been changed to http://www.dicksondata.com ever since, all traffics to DicksonWeb are now divert to the new website).

Now why a name matter a lot has several reasons. Here they go:

• If your domain name is short yet meaningful, it means it can be remembered by people at once, and will cover the targeted market as well.
• Long URLs have greater probability of getting misspelled by users.
• Long URLs if separated by [-] can resolve the issue of misspelling, and can also help search engines to index a site for the keywords in the URL.
• If your domain name contains a keyword in it, chances of getting in top pages of SERP results are much higher.

Well, domain names though play a vital role in websites’ popularity, but cannot be considered as the only factor, as there’re many other things that make up a good site. Quality of services stands first among all, i.e. your visitors rate and spread word about your site only when they find value in it. And, the other major factor that contributes towards the popularity is right marketing at right time, but this is very much relevant to the first one, i.e. highly satisfied visitors do half of your marketing themselves.

Be choosy while selecting domain name, as it represents the core essence of your site, but do not stick to the name only.