When you decide to start a food blog or just have a website one of the first and most important things to do is choosing a domain name. Picking the wrong name can have a negative impact in a long run.
As a new food blogger, there are many mistakes that can be avoided when you try to decide what domain name to purchase. Most people realized these mistakes when they already happened.
Today is becoming very hard to find good, short web addresses. You can go with longer domain names but there are some recommendations to follow and remember that very long addresses can look rather like spam and cause-related issues.
Here we’ll show you the most common mistakes people do when choosing a domain name and how to avoid them.
Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Domain Name
1. Picking the Wrong TLD Domain Name Extension
When you decide to start a food blog or just have a website one of the first and most important things to do is choosing a domain name. Picking the wrong name can have a negative impact in a long run.
There are many things to consider when buying a domain name. Your domain name will have also an impact on your SEO. When a domain name is too long people often can forget the address or make a mistake. Your domain name needs to be easy to remember and short. It is important to choose a name that represents you, your company, or what’s about and choose the right domain extension.
When you are choosing a domain name extension, “.com” is still the most popular, and whenever you can always go with it. Of course, there are so many TLD domain name extensions but “.com” has established as the most well-known and visitors always will go with that choice when have to type it.
Avoid using hyphens and no numbers in your domain and use one word or one set of words.
2. Picking a Domain Name Difficult to Spell
There are over $370.7 million domains registered across all top-level domains as of 2020 is not a surprise that is hard to find an easy domain name available. It is not required to try to find an exact match of the domain with your brand.
It is important to pick a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to pronounce and spell. Spend the necessary time to discover a good domain name. One way to do that is by using domain name suggestion tools that can help you using your initial domain ideas and keywords to create a unique domain name.
It will be easier for website visitors to share your domain name by using the oldest referral system: word-of-mouth. Easy domain names are easier for your potential customers to share your site.
3. Picking a Domain Name Difficult to Remember
One of the most common mistakes people do is choosing a domain name that is hard to remember. If you want to grow your business it’s important for your website’s domain to be easily remembered.
If you use a hard-to-remember name users will type this name wrong as many times as possible and they may give up and not feel like typing it again.
Another important thing is that using a keyword in your domain name can still help your SEO ranking.
4. Using Hyphens or Numbers in Domain Name
When choosing a domain name is important to make it right the first time. Keep it simple and average two words in the domain name. Avoid hyphens and numbers and do not try to choose a similar name to another website just because is getting a lot of traffic.
It is difficulty also for a verbal communication using a domain with hyphens or numbers.
Make it easy for people to type your domain name. Hyphens are not recommended as people do not remember to use hyphens and it is not SEO friendly. Stick to A-Z letters and leave other characters alone.
5. Using too Long Domain Name
These days it is so difficult to get your desired domain name as so many websites are popping up every day and people would have already picked up those small names. But choosing a lengthy domain name might reduce your chances of getting a good traffic. For people is easy to type a smaller name rather than a lengthy name.
The domain name length in relation to .com most commonly used in registrations is containing 2 words and it is around 12-13 characters.
The maximum length of the “label” part of the domain name separated by a dot is 63 characters, while 253 characters are the maximum length of a full domain name, including dots.
Having a short name is easier to remember and makes it less chance to misspelling.
6. Domain Name Similar to Another Business
When picking a domain name make sure is not similar to another business. There is nothing more frustrated than putting so much efforts and having a traffic growing just to find out that they are actually looking for that other business name similar to yours.
Coming up with a business name or domain name is not an easy task and it is better to spend more time or hire a professional team and spend a few hundred dollars but you’ll be sure that is done correctly.
Make sure you choose a domain name that no other brand uses otherwise your brand won’t have a strong recognition and you’ll be losing customers.
7. Buying Your Domain Name not Fast Enough
This may sounds pretty simple but it is one of the majority mistakes people do when choosing a domain name. You have to know that there are over 1 billion websites in the world today and every day more than 547000 new websites are created globally.
This shows that the chance someone else to pick your name is quiet high. If you find a name you like make a research and don’t wait because you may lose that name and have to start the whole research process over again.
8. Not Doing a Thorough Research at Domain History
This is the last of our list of top 8 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Domain Name but it is really important. Most people when they see a domain name available they buy it right away without doing any research for this domain. People don’t know that domain names are now always brand new and some of them can have history.
Looking at the link and content history of the domain you plan to buy can be crucial for your SEO. To view backlinks before you purchase the domain name you can use any of the backlink tools like SEMrush, ahrefs, Moz, or Majestic.
The main reason is that the domain may have a bad reputation, it could be banned from Google, Facebook, and other major websites, it could be used as spam, and could be blacklisted. Spend a little more time researching the domain but this will definitely saves you a lot of trouble later.