Did you pick a good web address?  Are you stumped trying to come up with a good “.com” address for your company?  I help customers every day come up with domain names for their websites and email addresses (A domain name is the “something.com” or something.org” a company uses).  Here are the basic rules I follow:

1. A domain name must be easy to tell someone over the phone without spelling it. I would rather have a long domain name that was easy to remember versus a short abbreviation that I have to constantly spell out.

2. Your domain name doesn’t necessarily need to be based on your company name. While you may have worked hard to brand your name, consider choosing a domain name that communicates what you do.  A name like ChicagoPlumber.com will benefit you more in Google than HarrysPlumbing.com.

3. Buy aliases for easily misspelled domain names. My website is the perfect example of the need for domain aliases.  Most people don’t know that my last name has two n’s.  So, when I tell people to visit my site, EricSpellmann.com, most people forget the second “n.”  I registered EricSpellman.com and pointed it at the same site!  Roughly one-third of the people visiting my site enter the misspelling of my name!

4. Avoid hyphens at all costs. No one remembers the dash. You may have chosen a domain name with a hyphen in it because your competition already grabbed your preferred address.  However, you will discover that you have to verbally remind people to enter the dash when typing in your site.  In fact, a large number of your clients will end up forgetting the hyphen and going to your competitor!  You cannot let that happen.

5. Write it out before you choose it. Some people choose domain names without checking out how they look.  Why is that important?  Well, I once had a client that wanted to register a domain for a website called Lawyers Exchange.  I told them to pick a different domain name.  They didn’t understand until they wrote out the address: lawyersexchange.com.