Elysium:Online » Web Hosting » Choosing The Right Domain Name

Choosing The Right Domain Name

Which domain name fits your company best?

The most obvious advice is that your domain name should feature your company’s public brand.

If your brand is two words or more, we recommend avoiding the hyphenated route – ie. acme-corporation.com. This makes it easier for your website’s domain name to be cited phonetically, and also keeps the domain shorter.

Cite the industry you’re in?

For SEO purposes, citing the field your business works in, can be a valuable inclusion in your domain name – ie. davewebstercarrepairs.com.

However, if your company operates more than one broad specialisation, it is worth avoiding this route, and letting sub-folders do the work when the domain is set up – ie. totalcomputers.com/printers and totalcomputers.com/laptops.

Multiple domains?

Some companies believe if they book lots of domains (variations of their brand name, slight misspellings, etc) and host exactly the same website on all of these, they will rank high on search engines. The reality is the opposite is true, as search engines do not favour duplicate content, they prefer it when a domain carries unique content.

That’s not to say it’s a bad idea to book lots of domains, it’s just that to avoid low or negative search engine rankings, you should set up the correct redirect service so that one domain is the ‘master’, the others simply forward the user’s browser to the ‘master’ domain. Naturally, at elysium:host, we can certainly assist companies who want to go down this route.

What is a TLD?

The part of a web domain after the final dot is the TLD – Top Level Domain. The most well known one is .com, commonly used for websites that trade internationally. As elysium:host works with many local businesses, a favoured TLD is .co.uk. Technically, this is an SLD (Second Level Domain) and a TLD.

.uk SLD/TLD combinations

elysium:host are able to assist in obtaining domain names ending in the following SLD/TLD combinations…

  • .co.uk – general
  • .ltd.uk – You must have a UK limited company that matches your desired domain name.
  • .me.uk – general (usually personal)
  • .org.uk – general (usually for non-profit organisations)
  • .plc.uk – public limited companies – you must have a UK plc that matches your desire domain name.

Take your pick

There are over 200 TLDs used on the internet, most of them referring to a country name. For example, .fr is associated with France and .hk is for Hong Kong. Should you need any of these, give us a call!

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