You need a domain name if you're serious
about being an online entity, it's where you'll direct all your potential customers to.
For them to become customers you've to make a good first impression and having your own
domain name rather than some free geocities address that's long and cumbersome will
enable you to do this.

There are lots of other benefits of having
your own domain, here's just a few of them.

A domain name is your own unique identity
and always will be as long has you continue to use that name. Say for instance you hosted
your free site with geocities and you found that you needed a more advanced host because
your website was becoming successful. Visitors and links to your site would know you by
the long geocities URL and you'd have to start promoting your new URL all over again. If
you had your own domain name you could change hosts as often as you like and people would
still be able to find you simply by typing in your domain name.

You can promote your website instead of
someone else's when you're sending emails as your domain name will be in the email
address, for example admin@akamarketing.com is helping to promote akamarketing.com while
akamarketing@aol.com is helping to promote and brand AOL.com

Your likely to have more traffic to your
website with your own domain name because more people will be returning as they can
remember your address and because many search directories such as Yahoo only index
websites with their own domain name.

Another advantage of having your own domain
name is that you can use custom error pages to prevent people from leaving your site
because of broken links and other errors.

Domain names are so cheap nowadays that
there's no excuse for not having one. Now that your ready to get yourself a domain name
here's some pointers to help you choose a good one.

Size does matter

Iface="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">n the case of domain names the smaller the better. Of
course short domain names are harder to find but if you can find one it has a number of
advantages such as, it's easier to brand, easier to remember and it's harder to
misspell.

Easy to remember

Try to get a name that's easy to remember
and sounds good. General words are best for this but since these are all gone at this
stage you should look for non general names or combinations of general names which rhyme
and sound good together. Take elephantdroppings.com for example that's an easy to
remember name.

Relate to your
business

If you use keywords which are related to
your business industry you will help your search engine rankings. What's even better is
if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your
domain name, this way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users
should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.

Avoid
similarities

This means you should avoid choosing domain
names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these people
could end up on your competitors site rather than yours because they got confused over
the two domain names.

.com is best

You should always aim for the .com version
of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing
something directly into their address bar, if you register .tv or .net or any of the
other available extensions and your competition has the .com version then you've just
lost a potential customer.