How to Choose a Domain Name

By Alexander Dolinin on February 28th, 2007

If you want to choose a great domain name for your online venture, here are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind.

• Go for your brand name. If yourbusinessname.com is available, register it right away. If there are any common misspellings of your business name, grab those as well, so you will not loose any “misspelled traffic”. That will pretty much end your domain name search. Lucky you. The rest of us, onward!
• Plan B: go for keyword(s) in your domain. It might give your site a little advantage in attracting traffic. Brainstorm the words you’d like to rank well for on search engines, then use a thesaurus
  to find even more. Now see if you can make a unique and memorable domain without going overboard with everykeywordunderthesuninyourdomain.com. There are better ways to use keywords in your website address.
• Keep it short. It will be easier to type and will allow for more of your page’s URL show up on the search engine results pages and that’s a good thing.
• Look for a .com domain. Generally, it is best to have a domain name that ends with .com. Most people take it for granted that your domain name will have .com at the end. Even a non-profit organization (where .org is common), or an Internet business (.net can work) can leak a lot of traffic to its .com equivalent.
• Avoid dashes and numbers. Dashes in a domain name look spammy and so can numbers. They also require additional instructions to a prospect over the phone on how to spell it. But if done right, even this rule could be bent: 72andsunny.com works quite well.
• Avoid tricky spelling. A greatdeal.com will beat gr8deal.com any day. Again, Flickr is a lucky exception to the rule. Or maybe they just had a bigger budget for educating people how to properly misspell the word.
• Avoid trendy names. Remember Y2K and all those companies with 2000 in their names? Don’t make the same mistake. And del.icio.us worked because it was original and had a tech-savvy target audience. Unless you can somehow top that, you’ll be seen as another knock-off.
• Make sure domain has clean history. If a domain has been used for spamming in the past, it will be blacklisted by search engines and will be useless if search engine rankings are important to you. Use WayBackMachine and DomainTools for your research.
• Register for as long as you can. Registrars give some discount for longer registration periods, but more importantly, it will be seen by search engines (especially by Google) as a sign of legitimacy of your business. Makes sense.
• Register directly through a registrar. You can search for a domain name in many places online, but go directly to a reputable registrar when you’re ready to buy. Don’t register it through your ISP or a web hosting company - you’ll save yourself a lot of headache down the road. I have been using GoDaddy for severals years now without any problems.

With enough perseverance, good luck, and this advice in mind you will choose a great domain name, I’m sure.

About author: Alexander Dolinin is a search engine optimization specialist with background in web design, web development and project management. He has been building and promoting websites since 1996.

Author's website: http://www.esherpa.net

Tags: Website Insights, Domain Name.