Domain Name

Every website has a name (known as the 'domain name'); for example this website is 'astraconsultants.com'. The purpose of the name is to uniquely identify a website, just as every telephone has a phone number which is just for that phone and every house has an address which is just for that address. A few notes:

• Normally every website is proceeded by 'www', which stands for "World Wide Web", and is used to tell your internet browser that you are looking for a website. However, the actual name is the bit which is after the 'www'. So, although most people refer to this website as www.astraconsultants.com, the name portion of this is astraconsultants.com.

• Many website names end in ".com", but not all. Originally, the suffix ".com" was short for 'communication', but now it would be more accurate to say that it is short for 'commercial'. Increasingly, non-commercial websites use different endings. For example, goverment websites end in '.gov' and educational institute websites end in '.edu'. The reason for the different endings is to indicate to people and search engines the purpose and ownership of the site.

• Likewise, businesses which are based in a specific country may end in the initials of that country. For example, instead of ".com" they may end in ".co.uk" if they are a company serving only the UK (United Kingdom) market. The purpose of using these types of ending rather than ".com" is to let visitors and search engines to immediately see that your web site is oriented around a specific country. More recently there is the '.eu' ending to indicate that the site has information or products mainly intended for the European Union.

Choice of Domain Name

You can choose almost any name you like, subject to a few restrictions:

• There is a maximum length (currently 255 characters).

• It can contain letters, numbers and certain special characters (such as hyphens).

• It must not already be in use. This is because each domain name is used to identify a specific website, so one cannot have two websites sharing the same name.

• The ending must be one of the existing recognized endings, such as: .com, .edu, .gov, .co.uk and so on.

Once you choose a domain name, you can check that it is available and that it is a valid name (in other words, does not break the four rules above). There are a number of places you can do this. For example, go to www.betterwhois.com and type your name into the box and click "search". It will tell you if the name is a valid name and if it is still available. If the name that you want to use isn't available, you can either think up another or you can use www.betterwhois.com to get a list of similar names which are still available.

The ideal domain name should be:

• Short. There are a number of advantages to short names, not least of which is that they are easy for clients to remember. Another advantage is that studies have shown that when a Google search gives a list of websites for a given topic, people are more likely to click on websites with short names. There are also some other advantages, which are more subtle.

• Meaningful. Your website name should be meaningful, as this increases the probability that people will remember it. There are also some SEO benefits to having a meaningful name. For example, if you sell property in Paris, you might want to call your website 'paris-property.com'. If your main client base is in France, you may wish to instead call it 'paris-property.fr', as this will give further SEO benefits.

• Memorable. Your website name should be easy to remember, as this will increase the number of people who return to your website. Memorable website names are generally short and meaningful. Names which are amusing (e.g. ugly-dog.com) or shocking can also be memorable, but one needs to be careful with these.

• SEO relevant. The choice of domain name has some influence on your SEO position. However, be wary of choosing a name solely for this reason as the SEO benefit is limited and it is important not to sacrifice the above 3 criteria. However, when you can choose a name which meets the above 3 criteria and is also SEO relevant, that is ideal.

Unfortunately, the above criteria are to an extent conflicting. For example, one wants a short name but may need to go for a longer name to make it meaningful. Consequently, one needs to balance the various criteria.

There are also special exceptions. For example, a company with a recognized brand name would normally always use their brand name for their website rather than anything else. It would be silly for Pepsi to have www.fizzy-soft-drink.com as their website name instead of www.pepsi.com. Likewise, institutions such as legal firms may be limited in their choice of name by professional considerations. However, for most people, the four guidelines described above are the major considerations.

No Second Chances

In terms of your website, the website domain name is the area where there are no second chances. If you get the website content wrong, you can rewrite it. If you have chosen a bad server to store your website on, you can move your website to another server without great difficulty. However, if you get your domain name wrong, then you have a serious problem.

This is best illustrated by an example. Consider the case where you choose as your domain name 'ski-equipment.com' and over the next year promote your site and achieve position 2 in Google. You then find out that you are selling more hiking equipment than ski equipment and consequently decide to change your name to 'sports-equipment.com'. To get a new name only costs about 20 euros (usually less). Unfortunately, even if you move all of the content (information) from the old name to the new name, from the perspective of the search engines it is a completely different site. This is because the search engines identify sites by domain names.

As a different site, you will no longer be position 2 in Google and may well not be in the top 1000 until you spend another year promoting your site. During this year, you will have almost no search engine traffic. Furthermore, all the links from other sites which you built up in the previous year will point to the old name instead of the new name, and the owners of these sites may not look kindly on any request to change the links on their websites just because you changed your website name. So in addition to losing most or all of your search engine visitors, you will lose a lot of your link visitors. To make matters worse, the search engines may decide that your new site is material stolen from your own site, and ban or de-rank the content (if you hire specialist technical assistance, this final issue can be avoided).

Alternatively, you may decide that you cannot lose most of your sales for a year, along with a year's effort and promotional effort, and elect to keep the old name. Unfortunately, for various SEO reasons, it is going to be difficult to get your site to rank for hiking equipment. Furthermore, visitors looking for hiking equipment may well decide not to examine your site when they see the misleading name of 'ski-equipment'.

To actually change your domain name only costs about 20 euros, but the resulting impact on your site performance is potentially huge. So this is an area that should receive particularly careful thought, not only taking into account your immediate business requirements, but also where your business may go longer term. If you do need to change your domain name, there are steps that can be taken to minimize the resulting issues, particularly if you are technically proficient or are able to hire suitable professional help. However, it is best to choose a suitable name to begin with, so that there is no need to change at a later date.