Choosing a domain name can prove to be difficult at best. A lot of people think that choosing a domain name is as easy as plucking a name out of the air. Unfortunately this is not the case. There are a few things you want to consider when choosing a name....
Choose a name that reflect your business:
To me this is one of the most important points when it comes to creating a domain name. Unless you’re a company like Nike who have marketed and sold millions of dollars of sports items for more than 40 years and have over a billions dollars in sales not to mention high profile celebrities sporting your products, then you want something that reflects your product. In fact before Nike became a house hold name, it was founded as Blue Ribbon Sports which marketed sport shoes. When people search for something on the Internet, 9/10 they will pick a website to browse through its domain name. Let’s say you browse Google for Alpine car stereos and returns the top 10 websites on its index for that search. All 10 returns have the words car and stereo within the URL but only one has the domain name alpinecarstereos.com. Chances are that alpinecarstereos.com will get the most hits. Even it was the 10th website on the first page, it would still get first hits as it targets its specific audience with its domain name.
Short vs Long:
When choosing your domain name you have upto 62 characters. This opens up the possibility to create a domain name that reflects your company more accurately and gives people a better understanding of the content of your site before going to it. But at the same time you don’t want a ridiculously long domain name.
For example let’s say I was going to build a website for model aeroplanes enthusiasts. I could go for either one of the following domains.
Modelaeroplaneenthusiasts.com or modelaeroplanes.com
Both domain names reflect the site very well and either one of those domain names could be used for the site. But you also have to ensure your site is not only easy to remember it’s also easy to type into the browser. While both are good names, modelaeroplanes.com would be the ideal choice as it’s easier to spell.
You also have the option of choosing a different domain extension if .com is taken. Some people will tell you that you should find a name with a .com association before anything else. Excuse my French but I say bollocks to them. If you use good sound SEO techniques when building and promoting your site, then regardless of what extension it has, it will still be ranked well.
Using Hyphens or numbers:
What you’re also going to find is that the names you may want are not available to you but a variation of the name is. Let’s say you wanted thisdomain.com but it was taken. But you could register this-domain.com or this1domain.com. If you’re happy with either one of the alternatives then go ahead and register it. Just keep in mind though, when you start to go down this avenue then you could end up sending your customers to your competition by mistake as most people would remember and input thisdomain.com before this-domain.com or this1domain.com into the url.
Also avoid trade mark names like the plague or you could find yourself in legal battle you won’t win. Let’s say you want to set up a mailing service and the find the domain name hotmail.info is available. Just because you can register it doesn’t means you have a legal right to it. At the moment there is great debt whether this still holds true today in the Internet world. In my humble opinion, it’s best to play it safe and avoid the hassle.
Avoid misspelling domain names purposely:
I can’t stress this point enough. If a particular domain name is taken, don’t try to get around it by purposely misspelling it or changing letters for numbers. People by nature won’t remember a misspelled domain over one that is spelt correctly. Plus it looks very unprofessional to potential customers.
in3t-pr0ducts.com
opposed to
inet-products.com
If you find a domain name which mostly likely has already been registered but is showing as available, then use spell check to ensure its spelt correctly.
Billions of people have already registered domains before you did so finding a domain name that has not been taken can be a little tricky. It’s a good idea to work on your site while thinking of your domain name and using a domain searching tool. One that I use religously is bustaname.com. Not only does it search all the major domains extensions it also lets you to add words to the search. Lets say your building a site on our earlier example of model aeroplanes. You can add 5 words, then choose if you want to search .com, net, org, info and .biz extensions and how many combinations of those words. Whether it just search for single, double or triple word combinations. It'll go through your list and provide the available domains for purchase. It also has various features to look for domains as well if you want to get technical. One feaure of this domain search I really like is the fact that it has discounted hosting through major hosting companies like Godaddy and will give you the option of purchasing your domain and hosting immediatley so as not to lose the domain name you have decided on.
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