Choosing a Good Domain Name for your LiveOptical Store

19 April 2015

With over a billion websites on the web getting a good domain is getting harder every year. As it is getting harder, Google and other search engines started to give less credit to good domain names when ranking your website. Content of your website became the most important factor. But domain is still very important, at least for you. With a good domain name it will be easier for you to advertize your website, tell other people about it and will ultimately contribute to success of your online business.

So what is a good domain name and how to get it? So criteria for a good domain name are:

Simple

The name of your website must be simple. Three words max. It is virtually impossible to get a one word domain any more, and two words can be still tricky. Two short words and one name would do the trick. Ex. glassesfromstef.com or opticalqueenworld.com

 

.COM

.com domains are better than .ca, .org, .uk etc. .ORG means organization, such as non-profit. If you are for profit don’t get .ORG .COM means global. When people name their websites with .ca in the end they suggest that the company is based in Canada and Google can limit your visibility to mostly Canadian customers or assume that you only ship to Canada. Same with .uk, .ch etc. If you however have a good budget and found a really good domain name, you should register .ca, .ch etc in addition to .com to ensure other people don’t get your website name with different extension and try to capitalize on your traffic.

Related to eyeglasses

Words with optical, eyeglasses, glasses, eye etc should be present in your domain. This is of course best case scenario. If your domain does not contain these words, with LiveOptical you have a choice to add them to all URL of product pages. For example all your eyeglasses pages can have word Glasses in them, example http://www.stefstore.com/eyeglassesPradaVPR02R This will give Google an indication that you are selling eyeglasses. In fact Google mentioned in their best practices document that the word related to your business should be part of URL, not necessarily domain.

Not ambiguous

It became very common to replace words with letters. For example U instead of You, or I instead of Eye. Try to avoid this with the domain name. It can happen that there is another website with the proper spelling. A lot of your hard earned traffic will go to them because people will normally type gramatically correct words for web address. Same applies to letters 4 instead of For. Same way try to avoid dashes, ex. eyeglasses-world.com. People are not used to type dashes in the web address you will risk to give away traffic to another website. Also try to avoid articles The or A. Many people know that Facebook was initially TheFacebook.com and they paid millions of dollars to buy out Facebook.com. It is understood that “TheSomething” can interfere with “Something”. Keep in mind that if you find a domain that is very similar to the website that is well known in eyeglasses industry, it may not be a bad idea to get that name with hopes to steal their traffic in your favour!

Not new

It used to be a big deal among webmasters to try get domains that have been registered before and either abandoned by their old owners or sold for profit. There are entire domain auctions where you can buy a domain name off someone else. The age of domain is always a factor. The older the domain the more expesive it will be. But our experience at LiveOptical shows that age of domain is not important. We see new domains do just about as good as old domains. The advantage of old domains could be that it already has backlinks leading to it and as you may know number of backlinks is paramount for success of your website on Google. So if you decided to pay someone for a domain name check if it’s really worth the money and verify how many backlinks it already has. Most of the time these are domains that were on someone’s hands for years doing virtually nothing, just owned by a person without a single webpage ever loaded to it.

Name is not a trademark

If you are serious about doing online business, you should run a trademark search in the Canadian and American trademark registries. If you find the same name as your domain in the database it means that you cannot trademark that name any more, at least not now. You can still register a domain and do your online business, but if one day you need to trademark this name you will have a problem. There is one exception if the trademark is not for selling eyeglasses. If they are selling just glass glasses you can still get a trademark in capacity of selling eyeglasses. There is about 6 trademarks under word Apple and only one is related to computers. If you are in doubt, consult a lawyer.

Good luck searching for a good domain name. Don’t get discouraged after a few hours of searching. Remember this domain will be stuck with your for many years. You have to love it!