If you have come to the point of purchasing your own domain name, you must be a serious blogger or someone who means business on the internet. Owning a domain name is an important aspect in e-commerce; but even more important is the wisdom that goes into the purchase and choice of your domain name.

In the virtual world, your address and your identity, both are defined by your Domain Name. It is unique and your organisation is known by it. In short, it is a brand name that you have on-line. And just like any other brand name, it needs to be chosen with a lot of care and thought.

Unless you have a real world brand name that is popular irrespective of your online presence, if you are not a sought after brand yet and are seeking to be well known, users are more likely to end up visiting your site through pages in search results or through links that they may have found elsewhere on the net where you have advertised. In such cases, your domain name is not what would have pulled in the initial traffic. If you want to capitalize on the traffic that you get and want your visitors to get back to you, your domain name plays a very important role.

First time visitors may notice your domain name but would not be giving enough attention to memorize it. Hence, the first trick is to keep it as simple as possible. Simplicity would mean short names and also names that have an easy recall value. For example, eMed.com would be easy to remember and recall for visitors who want to come back. Electronic EnterpriseMedicine.com may not be what you would want to name your domain as, though it may be quite easily available for purchase.

It is with the simple intention of increasing recall value that the .com domain is much preferred over the .net domain. .com is pretty common and has been in vogue for years now and is entrenched in public memory. If you go for a .net or .org domain, you are better advised to purchase your .com domain too, as users would have memorize you as eMed.com, even if you happened to be eMed.net. Visitors who return may not bookmark your site and may just type your name in the address bar and may land up in your competitor’s site who had hosted his site as eMed.com.

Again, for sake of better recall, do not use numbers or hyphens in domain names. Having domain names that are related to your overall business would help visitors click on your name when it resembles the product or service that they are looking for.

Getting the initial traffic takes time and effort – and domain names play a crucial role in the process.