Domain Name Selection

Daisy K.’s Tips for choosing a Great Domain Name

Before you rush out and buy a domain name for your website, you might want to consider the following tips:

1. Make Your Domain Name, Your Website Name

Having a domain name that matches your website name and business name is the ideal. Since people will know you’re the name of your business they will first think the domain name matches and automatically try to go to that site. Having this match is also great for SEO purposes.

If the exact domain name your desire is no longer available you have several choices:

• Find out who owns the domain name and then contact the person or company and see if they are willing to sell it to you. Use a domain register's WhoIs search feature.
• If you want to create an Internet business from starch or an affiliate marketing site or other site where the exact name of an established business is not in play, find a similar domain name and change the name of your site to match.
• Go with an alternative name.
• You can try adding "co" to the end of the business name.
• Try variations of the initials of the site name.
• Create a hyphenated name by adding dashes (-) between the words of the site name. While search engines will ignore the dashes in hyphenated names and people often forget them too and may wind up on someone else’s site. (HINT: Domain names can only use letters, numbers, and dashes. Spaces and symbols are not allowed. Also, domain names are not case sensitive.)
• Hyphens can also be used to separate words that might also form unintended words for example Bust-its.com not BusTits.com
• Take a suggested domain name. When the domain you want is not available most domain name registers will suggest alternatives often the plural or adding a "the" or "my" to the front of the name. If you use the "the" or "my" version be sure to add the "the" or "my" to your sites name. I would avoid the plural as it often does not make sense to the site’s name and is easily forgotten.
• Use a foreign word that means the same in English is it is common word like "Amore" for "Love".
• Use a keyword search engine to suggest keywords for a business or affiliate you intend to market.

Lastly, you just have to consider all the alternatives and come up with the best available domain name.

2. Using a Generic Name or Brand Name for a Domain Name.

While having a generic name like pizza.com might seem like a good idea but the fact is most of them are already taken or will cost you be bucks to acquire. Save the generic names for your SEO keywords and have your domain become your brand name. Branded names are easier for people to remember and bring them to your site not a million others just like it.

3. The Length of a Domain Name

Domain names are between 2 and 67 characters (not including the extension). That being said however there appears to be some disagreement about whether a long or short domain name is better.

Some will argue that short domain names are easier to remember, easier to type therefore less susceptible to mistakes. Take "pizza.com" over "myfavoriteneighborpizzashop.com". It is much easier to type the first verse the second.

Others argue that a complete domain name is usually easier on to remember than an acronym nobody knows. For example, "TGACCHW.com" would be harder to remember than "TheGetAnCarCheapHereWebsite.com". Since it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the short meaningful domain names, going with a longer name may the better choice. Further consider that longer domain names that have your website’s keywords in them may fare better with an Internet search engine.

If you must go with a longer name try keeping the number of words low or the total number of syllables low as these maybe easier to pronounce and remember too.

So try for the short meaningful name first then look for a longer one. I would recommend avoiding really long names however (67 characters would be way to much!) unless you it contains your keywords then use it only as a redirected site name as it may fare well with search engines.

4. Use the .COM, .ORG, .NET, ???

One common dilemma is when the ".com" domain is not available but the ".net", ".org" or other country-specific top level domains (TLD) is. Should you go with one of these?

Again, the ideal is the ".com" (if you are a US business) however since the exact one you want may be taken you have to consider the alternatives mentioned before. As for the rest…

• ".net": From my experience I would only take the .net if you are building an Internet related site as this is the intended audience for this TLD.
• ".org": Only use for organizations that are nonprofit
• Any country TLD (like .ca, .uk., .de, …): This is nice alternative for someone doing business in that country but would most likely be forgotten by US users.
• The other miscellaneous TLDs (.info, .biz, …): forget about them since most people don’t even know they exist.

5. Avoid trademarked names

If you are not sure if a word in your domain name is trademarked or not check it out first here. You can’t by US law use trademarked names in a domain name so to avoid be corporate lawyers knocking on your door do a little research first before using a word that might be trademarked.

6. Is one domain name enough?

Often people will register the .net and .org of a .com just so others will not use it. Also, registering variant spellings of commonly misspelled words is not a bad idea if you really want to make sure no one else profits from your domain name. Further, the sites initials can be registered if you plan to use the acronym in ads or other ways. You can redirect these other domain to all point to the same website.

7. In Conclusion...

If you are just starting out building an Internet or affiliate marketing business online or a website for genealogy or some other purpose, GET THE DOMAIN FIRST! Then everything else follows that name; this is way easier than trying to retro fit a name to a site.

Don’t be afraid to test your names. Ask friends and family what they think about several available names. Ask things like "Which one is easiest to remember?", "Which one fits the site?", "Which one is easiest to type or spell", …

As soon as you a find a name that works; REGISTER IT (use one the registers below)! Don’t wait until you have the site built then go back and get it because it may be gone!