Choosing the right and perfect domain name for your business website can become a tedious task if care is not taken.
Choosing the perfect domain name alone is a critical and big decision that requires proper planning because if you choose a wrong domain name for your business, it can deny your business the online success it deserves.
So what is a domain name?
A domain name is your website name, it is like a Street name that you can use to identify a particular Street address but in this case, it is used to identify your website address and to access your website.
What is a domain name extension?
A domain name extension is the last part of your domain like .com, .net, .biz, .ng, .com.ng etc. It is also called Top Level Domains (TLDs).
What’s the difference between all these extensions?
I will only talk about the few popular domain names extensions in order not to bore you with too many things to read because we have thousands of domain names extensions.
.com: short for Commercial, initially created for commercial organizations in 1985 and later opened for general use.
.org: short for Organizations i.e churches, NGOs, Non-profit organizations, Associations etc.
.biz: short for Business. i.e especially for the entertainment industry and others
.info: short for information. Indicating that the domain is intended for informative Internet resources. It’s good for researchers and people along educative or academic line.
.net: short for network. Indicating it was originally intended for organizations involved in networking technologies, such as Internet service providers and other infrastructure companies.
.ng: is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Nigeria.
Advantages of .NG over .COM
One major advantage that a .ng domain have is that if your business is solving local problems, you would love to use a ccTLD (.ng) domain rather than a generic TLD (.com) as this will help visitors to identify with your website domain name easily.
Also, when people are searching for information online, Google Algorithm gives priority to ccTLD domains first by returning answers to your searches from local domain name within the same location that you are searching from before sourcing for the further answers from a generic domain.
However, due to the popularity of .com, many business owners still prefer to go with a .com rather than .ng domains.
What most Nigerian businesses do nowadays is that once your preferred domain name is no longer available in .com, you can decide to register it in .ng.
So how do you choose the right domain name and domain name extension for your website?
What makes choosing the right name a tedious work is because .com is the most populous domain name extension and it is still the best domain name extension however, almost all the good and simple easy to remember words (domain names) have been registered under .com while same name could still be available in other extensions.
So in choosing the perfect domain name and extension, you will have to search to see if your preferred domain name is still available before you can register it, to search for a domain name availability, I will recommend you use Hostlag. Searching for a domain name availability is free, you don’t have to pay for it, you only pay when your domain name is available and you are ready to register it.
That you have registered your business name with Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) is not an automatic guarantee that same name would be available online. However, if you find it available, count yourself lucky.
Hence, what you need to do is to keep playing with words, using keywords that relates to your business until you have a name that is available to be registered.
Also keep in mind that your preferred domain name should not be more than two to three syllables long. Don’t go for long names that users will find difficult to remember or to spell.
Always buy your domain name from trusted domain registrars, I will recommend Hostlag any day any time. Beyond domain names registration, your web hosting services, website securities and web developments too can be handled by Hostlag.
Article written by Ebenezer Dare. Follow me on LinkedIn and Facebook via my full names Ebenezer Dare Olawole and on Twitter via @DareEbenezer and Instagram via @ebbydare
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