A first key supplied to the net surfer

The domain name is one of the first elements enabling the Net surfer to access your site. Its choice is therefore particularly strategic and is an integral part of a policy of online communication (offline too…). 

So it really is essential to spend some time thinking about its name and its structure.

A domain name consists of two parts.

• The first part contains one or more terms (including letters and/or figures) separated or not by hyphens (example: my-1st-company).
• The second part corresponds to the name extension (example: .com, .fr, .biz, .eu…).

These two parts are separated by a dot.

Example: my-1st-company.fr

Generally, there are two "styles" of domain name of a professional nature:

• the style that is similar to the name of a company, a brand…

Example: my-1st-company.com

• the style that is representative of an activity.

Example: description-of-my-activity.com

Advices from webtrafiz

If the chosen domain name contains several terms, separate these terms by hyphens. They will then be easier to distinguish by search engines, increasing their impact in the framework of natural referencing.

Choose an extension in accordance with your communication policy and the public targeted (example: .fr if the target is French-speaking only). The extension, just like the location of the site, is only important when the Net surfer makes a search located in the search engines (example: the "Pages: France " part on Google is only supposed to pick out the sites whose domain name ends in .fr or  sites whose hosting is located in France).

Only communicate on a single and unique domain name. It is nevertheless advisable to reserve the variants of your domain name (with/without hyphen, multiple extensions…) in order to counter any malevolent reservation by a third party and to ease access to your site (example: the Net surfer types one of these variants directly in his browser, but it reaches your site anyway).

Choose a domain name including terms with impact for referencing. However, if you choose a domain name not very representative of your activity (example: my-1st-company.com and not description-of-my-activity.com), you will be able to compensate for this "gap" by refining your file names (e.g:  www.my-1st-company.com/description-of-my-activity/activity1.html) or by creating explicit sub-domains (e.g:  description-of-my-activity.my-company.com/).

Reserve your domain name as soon as possible. Its seniority is indeed one of the criteria taken into account by the search engines in the analysis they make of your site. A domain name reserved a few years ago encourages the engines to have more “confidence” in your site that in a site with a domain name reserved a few days ago.

Renew your domain name for a long period. The lifespan you envisage for your domain name, and by extension for your site, is indeed one of the criteria taken into account by the search engines in the analysis which they make of your site. A domain name reserved for several years encourages the engines to have more “confidence” in your site that in a site with a domain name that expires after a year.