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What’s in a domain name? Your domain name is going to be integral to your brand, and a good one will help people to remember and return to your site. It’s probably more important for your domain to be memorable and brandable than for it to be relevant to your subject matter. If it can be both that’s just icing on the cake, but don’t get too hung up on relevance or keywords. According to Christopher Heng at thesitewizard.com your site should be named after your domain, and I completely agree.

Here are a few guidelines to help you choose a domain name:

• Unless you are targeting traffic outside of the United States Try to get a .com domain if at all possible - it’s the standard at this time and some American users will insist on typing in .com and will have trouble finding your site if you use another TLD. Even worse the site that they do find will be your competitor with the .com domain.
• If you just can’t get a .com, then at least go for .net or .org unless you have a really good reason not to. BTW .info has nearly become synonymous with spam.
• It should be as short as is reasonably possible, but realize that as time goes by the short names get used up first. Also, memorable is more important than short. pgws.com may be short but prettygoodwebsite.com is easier to remember.
• It should be easily and unambiguously pronounceable and spellable. Something like spoob.com is much better than qsrw.com because you can easily pronounce it and spell it – and thus remember it.
• In my opinion you should use absolutely no dashes, underscores or other word separators. Using them might be good for SEO if you have keywords in your domain name, but they make it very hard to verbally communicate. my-ideal-key-phrase.com is very likely to be misunderstood or mis-typed as myidealkeyphrase.com, thus sending your traffic to the competition.
• Try to avoid word combinations that could have double letters between them – for example carracing.com - caracing.com because it’s hard to remember if it should be one or two Rs.
• When you find one that you like don’t wait too long before buying it or it might be gone.
• If you know that 100 percent of your traffic is going to come from search engines and you have no interest whatsoever in subscribers, or branding then forget all of this and go with a keyword dense domain with underscores for word separators. I can think of some reasons you might do this – Adsense Arbitrage or splogs with names like viagra_viagra_viagra.info. If that’s what you’re into then have at it.

A couple of tips:

• Instant Domain Search is a great place to find your domain, it’s dynamic and doesn’t tip anyone off that you are thinking about a particular name plus it shows you a list of lowest prices from various registrars.
• Godaddy.com has some of the cheapest rates for domain registry, however I don’t really recommend them for hosting, but that’s another article. Notice their brandable, yet completely unrelated name.
• If you use a coupon code you can save another 2 dollars on dot coms.
• Unregistered domains are cheap, if you run across one that you think you might use, snatch it up – if you don’t use it you will have lost very little.
• Just brainstorm and type stuff in, write down the ones that are available, until you find something that you are happy with.
• Any registrar (like godaddy.com) will have a free search function that you can use.
• Don’t settle too soon, there are still good ones available.

This article is full of my personal opinions, and no doubt some people will disagree with me on some points. You might want to read some other articles about choosing a domain name before you commit.

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