How To Choose A Good Domain Name

What is a domain name?

A domain name is like “google.com”. A name that people use to find your website.

How to choose a good domain name?

If you already have a business name, you might want to register a domain name that is as close to it as possible for branding purposes.

Also consider the following:

A good domain can have the following few attributes, but it does not necessary need to have them all:

* contain keywords

* gives an idea to people to what the site is about

* short and brandable

* no confusing characters or dashes

* .com over other extensions

Contain keywords

Keywords can be in domain as makemoneyonline.com contains the commonly searched phrase: “make money online”.

How do I know that it is a commonly search term? A simple way is to do a search for your targeted keywords on overture keyword selector. This is only an estimated number based on yahoo/overture search engine searches. This does not contain Google searches, which is a much larger number. The more searches the better.

A good domain with good keywords can help bring in organic traffic, which means visitors that enter your site from a search engine.

This can be good if you plan to only promote what your domain means.

However, do remember that a domain name like a business name should not be limiting. A domain name like buyleathershoes.com is not good if you want to sell more varieties of shoes in the future. What if you want to sell track shoes or sandals, for example? When people look at the domain buyleathershoes.com, they wouldn’t think that you would sell any other thing that leather shoes, and this brings me to the next attribute, brandable names.

Brandable names

A brandable name is something like google.com, digg.com or even like my site omicra.com(which teaches internet marketing for businesses), they can give an idea of what the site is about but they don’t need to. It is short, easy to pronounce and easy to spell which makes it easy to remember.

Remember when people don’t know how to pronounce a word or name, they would avoid saying it. This can be very bad for your website because you are stopping people from spreading your website by word of mouth.

The good thing about such domains is that they can really be used for anything. You can sell leather shoes or even hair spray because it does not limit your website. However, when this is good for a multi-purpose or web2.0 site, it is not necessary good for sites such as those that want to promote single products. A person who wants to buy a Linksys router, for example, would rather go to linksysrouters.com than medora.com if they have no prior experience of both websites.

Domains with dashes

A domain like buy-leather-shoes.com has an disadvantage over a domain without dashes because when you want to tell it to people by mouth, you can’t just say “buy leather shoes dot com”, you must say “buy dash leather dash shoes dot com”. This is not good if you plan to do any word of mouth promotion like radio promotion, where the dj has the read it out. It gets hard to remember too.

This is rather ok for smaller sites that you don’t plan on expanding much like if you have a business that sells leather shoes at main domain like brett.com, but you are running a promotional campaign on buy-leather-shoes.com because it is more descriptive of your business than brett.com. Still, however, it is disadvantaged compared to buyleathershoes.com.

A small advantage that dashes have is that it can make things clearer when there is a need for example expertsexchange.com can be “expert sex change” when it actually means “experts exchange”.

Why a .com over a .net?

People remember .com better. If your site is buyleathershoes.net, a number of people won’t remember the extension and go to buyleathershoes.com instead. However, a .org might be more appropriate to some organisations than .com.

Where do I register a domain name?

I would suggest namecheap. Enter the domain name in the text box and click search. Follow the instructions from there.

What if my domain is already taken?

Then you have 2 choices. Buy another domain or buy the domain from the current owner. But remember that the current owner may be a domainer, they buy domains for the sole purpose of reselling so they might charge you a high price. If the domain is currently being used for a popular site, the owner probably won’t sell it.

You should consult experts if you are dealing with very highly priced domains.

JC Lee is a webmaster that runs Omicra.com. Omicra.com is a site that is targeted at small and medium businesses. The site aims to provide the best and most practical answers on how businesses can establish a web presence and use the internet to make more money. He can be hired to set up a website from scratch including buying domain name.