Unless you've been living in a cave somewhere for the past decade, you now know that owning a website and promoting it the right way can help you improve your freelance translation business. There are many steps that you have to go through when you finally decide to build a website for your business, but one of the beginning steps is to choose a domain name for your foreign language translation business.

There are many articles on how to choose a domain name, and most of them offer good general tips for people interested in building their websites. However, there are some things to keep in mind when choosing a domain name for a translation business.

First of all, a website domain name is usually the first introduction a person has to your website, and by extension, your business. If that person, a potential client, doesn't have a good first impression of your domain name, there's a greater possibility that that person won't click on your website, and therefore you won't have that lead. That places a considerable amount of pressure on just the domain name.

So what characteristics should your foreign language translation business domain name have? I think the most important thing is that the domain name needs to be descriptive of what your business provides. Many people in the translation industry use their name as the domain name for their business and while this isn't horrible, it doesn't do a good job of describing what your business offers. For example, if you are a Spanish translator, put some combination of the word "Spanish" with another word, so that when people see your domain name they will at least know you work with Spanish and not something else.

Another thing to remember when choosing a domain name is to make it readable. Previously, people thought that dashes in domain names weren't very professional and that search engines didn't like them. Well, I don't think that is necessarily the case anymore. The goal of search engines is to provide good results for human searchers and making a domain name easier to read by using dashes between words will help human visitors be able to read the name of your website and know what it's about. In the world of the Internet, seconds do matter and if a (potential) client has a hard time reading the domain name for your foreign language translation business, you can forget about them spending extra time trying to read it. They'll move on to the next site for sure.

Whatever you decide to use as your domain name, though, make sure it fits your business and that you make it easy for visitors to read it. Just by taking these tips into consideration, you will be on your way to then creating a website capable of attracting clients in need of your foreign language translation services.