Sometime ago, I wrote about how to choose a blogging niche. To continue the series about Starting A Blog Tips, I will today talk about 5 important things to consider while choosing the domain name of your new blog.

Which domain name extension to choose?

Always go for a .com or .net – Giving the .com a preference of course. You must be asking why a .com or .net – A .com domain name is easier to remember by first time visitors or even those who have heard about your blog via offline marketing will most probably be adding the “.com” on their initial search for your site. The .com domain extension is the most popular in the world followed by the .net domain extension.

Now if your blog is one which will be limited to a specific country, you can as well go for a country top level domain. For example if you are creating a blog which will talk about Tourism in Mauritius, you can go for tourism.mu but if your audience will be a worldwide one, then the .com or .net are best.

My personal order of preference while choosing a domain is: .com or .net or .org or .co

Shorter domains names are better

Try to find a short domain name. It is firstly easier to remember and also looks more professional. A two words domain between 8 to 15 characters is perfect. My favorite tool to check which domain names are available or not is the name.com domain search tool.

Easy to remember and spellable domains

Have you ever heard of www.hotgfqdsf.com? The domain is short and you even get a .com with it. But what does it mean? I am sure that if I ask you to spell this domain again in the next 15 minutes from now, you will have already forgotten it. The tip is to choose a domain which is easily remembered and spelled by first time visitors. Choose a domain which can also be easily shared via mouth-to-mouth marketing.

Avoid hyphens and numbers in your domain

It is not surprising that most .com or .net domains that you are searching for are already taken. Thus come the urge to add the famous hyphen or even numbers to the domain simply to have a .com extension. This is a bad habit since most people often forget to add the hyphen when typing your domain name in their browser. Numbers make the scenario worse. If we can easily miss a hyphen, it easier to forget which number was associated with your beautiful .com domain!

Domain for people

Have you ever come across a domain like: thebesttipstocreatethebestblogintheworld.com? Yea it has all the keywords that people will be searching for and you can even think that this will give you a SEO boost for this particular keyword. You are wrong since recently Google has changed its algorithm and having such long domain name keywords does no more really help in indexing. What matters most is your content. So try to get a domain which is descriptive but SANE.

Now that you have these tips in mind, you can visit a domain name registrar to purchase your domain name. I recommend the famous Godaddy or Name.com since I have always been using one of these two registrars  both for their stability in the business but also for the lower registration prices. You can also google for Godaddy Coupon Codes of Name.com Coupon Codes to obtain further discounts on their usual prices.

Tagged as: blog domain name tips, choose a domain name, purchase a blog domain name

This article was contributed by Kurt Tewin

Kurt is a webmaster, blogger, and PHP developer who lives on the Paradise island of Mauritius and who has a crazy obsession for everything Wordpress and Blogging. He founded Icy Tips to share some of his tips with the community. He is also the owner of IC a famous multi-niche daily updated community blog and the C.E.O of Icy Evolution Ltd.

Kurt has written 24 awesome articles for us at Icy Tips