The Quest for the Perfect Domain Name

There are long domain names.

Short domain names.

Hyphenated domain names.

Unhyphenated domain names.


Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters.


Which leaves a wide room of imagination for those in pursuit of the perfect domain name.


Shorter domain names are easier to remember, to type and far less susceptible to typos: for example, "reddit" is easier to remember and less prone to typos than "readitnmore".


Longer domain names can be abbreviated for example, "bwia.com", where if we expand it to its long form, "BritishWestIndianAirways.com", we are less likely to remember this more likely to remember the domain name in it's abbreviated form.


Some may argue that it is increasingly difficult to get short meaningful domain names. But there are many names which can be thought up of if time is taken to carefully explore name variations.


Long domain names that have your site keywords in them tend to have an advantage in that they far better in a number of search engines. For example, if you have a site on selling widgets with a domain name like widgets.com or widgetsforsale.com or even widgets-for-sale.com, it may do better in a search for widgets than another site, with a name unrelated for example waynestown.com.


Hyphenated domain names and unhyphenated domain names


Search engines can distinguish your keywords better and thus return your site more prominently in search results for those keywords occurring in your domain name. They results may eve be better if they are hyphenated.


The main disadvantage to hyphens is that when people recommend your site to their friends verbally, having hyphens in your domain name leads to more potential errors than when the name does not contain hyphens.


For example, how do you think your visitors will refer to your site if it is named "widgets-for-sale.com"? They might say, "I visited Widgets for Sale dot com yesterday. It is a fabulous website." Their friends, remembering that comment later, might type into their browsers "widgetsforsale.com".


For this reason it may be better to have an unhyphenated version of your name as well, having several domain names is always best.


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