Maximum Domain Name Length

We are hoping that this will never be an issue for you, but every once in a while we get some very interesting questions. We occasionally get a call into our Sales or Customer Support Department asking us "what is the maximum amount of characters I could use for my domain name?"
As you probably know the domain name you use for your web site is very important. Considering the attention span and memory capacity of most humans you want something that is easy to remember and catchy. So we don't know if a very long domain name is ever truly useful - but here is the answer. A standard domain name may have 63 characters, which could be made up of numbers, letters, and hyphens. Then there is room for up to four spaces for the domain name extension such as .com, .net, or .info. So overall a domain name may use up to 67 spaces but obviously you would want something with the least amount of characters so your users could easily remember your domain name and also type into in their web browser. From a search engine ranking perspective, it would be helpful if your desired keyword(s) is included in your domain name although you must find a balance because you cannot only please the search engines. For example you could use all of the allocated 63 spaces on keywords but then customers would probably not remember your company name - so this balance is very crucial. But don't feel that you won't rank on search engines if your keyword is not listed in your domain name. A great example of this is Google; Google started off as a search engine although if you were to hear the name Google 8 years ago you probably would not know that they are in the search engine business. So if a search engine were to come across the Google domain name it would not know that Google is a search engine just from the domain name. Rather there are a bunch of other factors which lead to search engine ranking and your domain name is just one component. So if your keyword is not included in your domain name, do not worry at all. For most people it is difficult to find the balance of easiness and search engine effectiveness. Hopefully this has helped, we would get further into the scoring method for search engines but quite frankly not too many people know this and we probably don't either. I mean if we did you would see us in control of every keyword on ever search engine - wouldn't that be amazing? In the end, just try to keep your domain names under 63 characters.