Do domain names require the same preparation needed for leaving a successful first impression?  If you place a lot of importance on pronouncing names correctly the first time you meet someone, then leaving your visitors impressed by your website would require special consideration of how others spell and, more importantly, remember your domain name.

Memory and spelling go hand in hand when it comes to choosing your domain name.  If you don’t want to lose a lot of visitors, you might have to consider registering more than one!  Take de.li.cio.us for example.  Not everyone can remember where to place each period, so they registered delicious.com as well.  Think of words that can be easily misspelled by simply replacing an s for a z.  I am sure that the owners of deliciouz (a shoe and accessories store in Walnut Creek, California) receive many website visits from people looking for that famous social bookmarking site.  I wonder how many clients they get that way!

Famous domain names are no exception:

Yahoo (and Yahooo)

Google (and Gooogle)

And what about whole endings that sound the same?  A really great example of this is with a media company who saw benefits in using both realize and realeyes.  If you clicked on each link you’ll notice that both domain names host the same website!

You might not have expected that numbers could be relevant, but they are!  Take woot and w00t for example!  For many keyboards, the letter o and the number 0 are right next to each other.  Google probably doesn’t mind, or doesn’t realize that someone might type G00gle a little differently.  It looks like Yahoo considered a numbered Yah00, but choose to make it into an error page.

Lastly, domain name extensions are important too!  Using those two major search engines as our examples again, you will find that Google ending in .net will be redirected to the .com website.  Yahoo, in the same context, sends you to an error page (they want you to get it right!).

You’ll notice with us that we have registered Gossimer.com, Gossimer.net, Gossimer.info, Gossimer.in (in case someone leaves out the fo in .info), and Gossimer.co.in, which redirects to Gossimer.biz.  Gossimer is all about domain names and webhosting (through Linux or Windows Plans), that is why giving access to customers, regardless of what domain name extension they use, is a priority.  With a little bit of foresight and imagination, you too can profit from anticipated spelling mistakes and confusions!