Importance of Domain Name

The first person with whom I started my training program is Pratik Bagaria from India. Pratik is a good designer and also has a day job. Pratik owns a domain name www.pratikbagaria.com and is planning to make it big by blogging about designing on his blog. I shared some money making techniques with Pratik. All the techniques explained to him involved his designing skills. If you have some skills then you can do wonders with it and make lot of money online. Pratik and I, while discussing various options had a debate on his domain name pratikbagaria.com. I told Pratik to use a different domain for his designing related blog while his original domain can still be there and later can be used for a personal blog.

It was very difficult for me to convince him but at the end he did agree. Its not only Pratik, there are many people who like to buy a domain with their name on it. Lot of times this is their first domain name and hence the excitement of having their name in the domain. Before rushing in to such a domain people should consider some points as explained below.

• Your domain speaks about what your site/blog is about. In this case Pratik's blog is dedicated for designing so a domain like designingtips.com or mydesigningworld.com will help for sure. For e.g. When a person searches for something on Google, he will have a look at the results and then the domain. People will always visit relevant domains. You cannot sell mangoes on a blog called www.myapplestore.com. On the other hand, a domain with your personal name on it usually suggests that its a personal blog not focused on a single topic. Such domains should not be used for business.
• Keywords in domain help a lot. People will search for keywords related to your content and hence having those keywords in your domain/URL does help. This does not mean that the domain in this case should be mydesigningskilldonphotoshop.com. It should be short and one should try to include at least one keyword in it.
• Your domain should be easy and should not include complicated words. In this case many would spell pratik as prateek and might mispell his last name as well. This is the main reason why my blog domain changed from harryblogs.com to HarryBlogs.com. Your domain has to be simple enough for people to remember and easy to spell. Complicated or not so easy to spell domain names can lose lot of traffic.
• Avoid using hyphens. I have a good personal experience on this one. People usually forget the hyphen in domain names.

This means your domain has to be easy to remember with your keyword niche in it. How has your experience in choosing the right domain been?