Which type of domain name should you choose?

Apart from the .com or .co.uk part of the domain name, you also need to choose the unique part of the domain name. Should it be your company name - or something else?

A unique identity
Since only one person can have use of a particular domain name, having one gives you a unique identity - just like a social security number, or a house number / post code combination. With just three letters ("tka") + .co.uk, our company, Traynor Kitching & Associates, is uniquely identifiable amongst the hundreds of millions on Internet users.

Corporate domain names
Many companies choose to have their company names in their domain names. "microsoft.com" and "bbc.co.uk" are two well-known examples. This is fine if you are a household name, since many people guess at a web site address using the company name.

But many smaller businesses also use their company name as their domain name. Is this wise? Well, it does no harm, but they might be better off having a generic domain name as well as their corporate domain name.

Generic domain names
A generic domain name is one that describes what your company does, rather than who you are. For example, instead of having "xyz-plastics.com", you might choose "plastic-mouldings.com".

Generic domain names are getting like gold dust. Just do a search for "generic domain names" and what you will find is a host of web sites offering to sell generic domain names - often at very high prices. What these people have done is to register generic domain names just to sell on. No longer can people register well-known company names to try to extort money from those companies; the courts have sorted that one out.

But generic domain names cannot be cornered by one company; they can be owned by anyone.

So, if you find generic domain names relevant to your business, buy them whilst you can. That's our advice.

Improve your web site's search engine ranking
Although the rules by which search engines "rank" sites when returning search results change often, most search engines favour sites with their own domain names over sites that do not have a domain name of their own.

Some search engines even give increased relevancy to domain names that contain "keywords" that people search for. For example, a search engine might rate a site with the domain name "plastic-mouldings.com" more highly than a site with the domain name "plastics.com" for the search "plastic mouldings " since the former domain name contains the search terms being searched for.

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