How to Choose a Name for My Website

What's in a name? When you are talking about the Internet, the answer is everything. The name of a website needs to embody the essence of the information on that website, be easy to remember and end in a .com.

This is the first question that needs to be answered when choosing a name for a website. The website name needs to explain the information on the website in a few short words. The relevance of the name is everything. If the website is about Celebrity Gossip, for instance, the name should be something pertaining to gossip or celebrities. This will help people to remember the meaning of the website and improves the chance of branding the website.

Have you ever noticed that some of the most famous websites have names with only a few characters. MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, eBay - these websites are among the elite web addresses and all of them are easy to remember. On the other hand, recalling the name of the free credit report website running commercials every 10 minutes on television is much harder. This is because the name of the website is too long and contains hyphens.

The memorability of the website name will be directly linked to the first question. The webmaster or website creator, needs to combine relevance and memorability when choosing the perfect domain name for their website. Step one and step two will take the longest amount of time when choosing the right name for a website.

There are many website name extensions to choose from today and some are much cheaper than others. Choosing the right extension is the easiest part of choosing the name of your website - just choose a .com. There are two reasons why your website name should always end in a .com. The first is linked to Step 1 and Step 2. No matter what the extension, people are going to end your website name with .com when they pass the link on to friends. It is the most common extension so take advantage of the word of mouth marketing.

The second reason is in auto completion tools built into Internet browsers. If the ending is left off of the website name, some browsers will automatically fill in .com at the end and search for that website address. If your website does not end in a .com these can wreak havoc on your marketing tactics or your website hits.

Choosing the name for your website will take more time than you ever thought possible. Even if you find the perfect name, there are millions of other people registering website names every day. The key is to buy the rights to that name as soon as you decide even if you have no perfectly lined out plans for the construction of the website. If not, that name might be gone and you will be right back at Step 1.