The do's and don'ts of picking a domain name

Hi my name is Daniel Walter Scott and I'm a trainer here at Bring Your Own laptop, now at this video we're going to look at the do's and don'ts of a domain name. Now the first one is numbers, stay away from numbers if you can, you don't want to curse yourself of gardeningsupplies4u.com where you're on the phone and "[email protected], no, no uh it's the 4, the number 4, yup, and u - just u by itself" don't do that to yourself.

Also stay away from hyphens if you can, hyphens generally mean the good domain name is gone, you've searched and you've found greengardeningsupplies.com and it's gone, so what you do is - sneaky trick - green-gardening-supplies, to get around that, the problem with that though is there's an existing business with the shorter version who're working hard at building their domain name and their brand around that domain name, you're going to start doing the same thing and what tends to happen is some of your traffic is going to end up back at them because that's the correct way of writing this one, you've got the kind of weird way of writing it, keep a unique domain name if you can and stay away from hyphens.

Another question I get asked is what if I just buy lots of domain names and have lots of them pouring into one website, won't I get lots more traffic, and that doesn't work, what happens is a website has one primary domain name and all the rest of the domains that point to it they will redirect but they won't bring in equal amounts of extra traffic in, a good thing you can do with extra domain names is to protect the domain name so, say for my Australian business, I have bringyourownlaptop.com.au, but also the byol.com.au just to protect the acronym and the longer version.

Also useful if you plan to go into other localised parts of countries, so if you plan to not only do the US but also the UK and Australia, the .co.uk, the .com.au, and all the other localised ones can be really handy, so we'll talk about that in the next video actually because that's an important part, deciding whether to buy .com or the localised say, .com.au for Australia, lets go check out that in the next video.