A domain name is vital to the success of a web site. It's where you'll direct all of your potential prospects to. To allow them to turn into clients, you need to create a good 1st impression. Owning your personal domain name instead of a free geo-cities web address (that is cumbersome and long) will enable you to achieve this. A domain name is your unique identity and always is going to be so long as you make use of that name. Say, for example, you hosted your free site with geo-cities and, also, you discovered that you needed a far more high level host as your site was getting successful. Visitors to your website would, obviously, know you from the long geo-cities U.R.L. and you would need to start advertising your U.R.L. once again from scratch. In the event that you owned your personal domain name, you can change your host as frequently as you prefer and folks would still have the ability to locate you merely by typing the name of your domain into a search engine. You are able to promote your site rather than another person's when you are sending emails because your domain's name is going to be contained in the e-mail address. For instance, [email protected] is promoting abcmarketing.com while [email protected] is promoting and branding yahoo.com You're likely to have significantly more traffic to your site with your personal domain name. Folks can remember your address easier and many search directories, for example, Yahoo only index sites using their own domain name. Yet another benefit of having your personal domain name, is that you can use custom error pages to avoid folks from leaving your website due to broken links along with other errors. Names for domains are so inexpensive these days that there is no excuse for lacking one. Here's some pointers that will help you select a good one: Size does matter Regarding domain names, small is good. It's simpler to brand, simpler to remember and it is harder to misspell. Simple to Remember Try to obtain a name that's simple to remember and sounds good. Search for combinations of general names or non-general names which sound good together and rhyme. Connect with your company If you are using key words which are associated with your company industry to name your domain and your other webpages, you can help your search engine rank. What's better still is if you're able to get your actual business name, or perhaps a name much like your organization name, as your domain name. In this manner, all of your off-line branding can pay off on line as online users will be able to guess your domain name from your own business name. Avoid similarities What this means is you need to avoid choosing names of domains that currently have similar counterparts on line. In the event that you choose one of these, some people could wind up in your competitor's site instead of yours. .com is best You need to always strive for a .com version of a name as that is what the majority of users will type into a search or directly in their web address bar. If you buy a .net or .tv (or any other extension available) and your competitor owns the .com extension, then you have lost a potential sale.