Choosing A Domain Name

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

A domain name is probably one of the most important part of your online business. Why so? That is what your customers and potential customers will be putting inside their browser URL field. What is a domain name? It is the thing that goes something like www.yourcompanyname.com (or any other variants of the name). That’s what is typed into the URL field at the top of your browsers. How do you choose a domain name?

Company Name

Do you have a company? If you do, then just use you company name as your domain name. This way you also get the benefit of branding your company name. What if there is already a domain in your company name? Well, you can try to buy over the domain. This may cost you a bomb if the domain is a higly ranked domain. You can also check to see if the alternative domain suffix are available. Try www.yourcompanyname.net or www.yourcompanyname.biz. If those are available, your can then use them.

If you have yet to register a company but thinking of registering one, then you should at least verify that the domain name for the company is still available. If it is available, you might want to register it first before actually registering your company. You never know how long it will stay available. Thousands if not millions of domain names are being registered daily. Someone on another part of the world may suddenly want to use your future company name as their domain and register before you get the chance to do so.

Suffixes

Dot what? Which domain suffixes should you choose? .com? .net? .biz? .org? If your domain name is based on your company name, then it’s best to choose .com if that is available. If not, you can always choose another domain name or the other suffixes. The reason to go with .com first is because that’s the norm. The .com is like the defacto standard for a company website. Even the browsers seem to add on .com first when you type in a domain without any suffix in the URL field.

Short and Catchy

A thing to remember when choosing your domain is to keep it as short as possible. If you can, make it short and catchy. Something which is very easy to remember. Let’s say you want a domain to promote multi functional printers. Which of the following is the most catchy and memorable?

www.multifunctionprinters.com
www.multi-function-printers.com
www.mfp.com
www.mfp2u.com

I would probably go with the last entry. MFP is already known to mean Multi Function Printers. Adding the 2U after MFP makes the domain catchy and enforces the idea that the offerings inside the website is meant for the readers.

No Trademarks

Be wary of domain names resembling trademarks. Unless your company is named Nike or McDonald’s or the likes of them famous names, don’t use these trademarked names as your domain even if it’s still available. The hassle of going through the legal proceedings if they file one suit makes it not worthy to do so.

Use Keywords

If not using company name, you should then use the keywords of your niche instead. List down all the keywords in your targeted niche market. Join them together to create a list of joined keywords, then you select one which attracts you the most.

Once you’ve selected your domain name, run it by a few friends and family members. Listen to their feedback. You might end up with a brand new domain which you didn’t think of.

With the finalized domain name, you must go and register your domain at the very first chance. Do not wait any longer. As I said earlier, it may not be available for you anymore if you wait longer.

Here is a video that shows you how to choose a good domain name.

After choosing your domain name, take a peek at this video on how to register your domain name.