How to find and choose a domain name

Posted by tom on 12th Aug 2008

hosting

Choosing a domain name isn't easy, especially if you want it to be a dot com. Why? Simply because pretty much anything you can think of has already been taken! I spent several hours trying to find the name for this website - I must have typed in hundreds of ideas, and out of the lot I only found 2 that were available.

But apart from availability, there's a bunch of other things you need to consider...

.com, .net, .info or something else

Most people want a .com domain name, as it's generally the easiest to remember. But, depending on the nature of your business, it might be ok, or even better to go with something else. For example, if your business only operates in the UK, you could settle for a .co.uk domain name. This will open up a lot more opportunities for you to find your ideal domain name. However, you should consider the future too. Will you always be operating in the UK? What happens if you decide to expand to a worldwide operation?

Registering variants

Depending on the nature of your business and the availability of TLDs (Top Level Domain) it might be a good idea to register some alternatives too. You can have as many domain names as you like all pointing to the same website, so alongside your .com or .us, get .net and .info. You wouldn't want some one else taking these variants on your domain name, would you? You have no idea what they might do with it and it could potentially cause you trouble down the road.

Keywords in the domain

There is very little evidence to suggest that search engines use keywords in the TLD when ranking websites. I'm inclined to believe that it doesn't make the least bit of difference which words or phrases are in you TLD - it's the content that seach engines are interest in.

To hyphen or not to hyphen

But if search engines really do take the TLD into account in their ranking algorithms, and you want to take advantage of that, it would make sense to assume that keywords need to be separated. Take for example, makemoneyonline.com. All a search engine is going to see is one long word, which nobody in their right mind is going to type into a search engine. To make it count for anything, you need to separate the keywords with a hyphen, so makemoneyonline.com becomes make-money-online.com.

But this introduces another problem, this time not for search engines, but for your visitors. People will simply not remember the hyphens, especially if they mainly hear about your website through word of mouth. As a solution, perhaps the best thing to do is to register the non hyphenated version for general use, and the hyphenated version for the search engines. For this to work, you would need to make the non-hyphenated version the primary domain, and redirect all others to it with a 301 (permanent redirect).

Where to look

There are so many places selling domain names these days it's not even funny. But to list a few:

Happy hunting

So, all I can say now is good luck on your quest for the perfect domain - I hope you have more luck than I did!

Jaya
14th Aug 2008, 9:00am

You bring up good points, especially about the 'hyphens or no hyphens' question. One thing I wanted to mention is that if a domain name you want is already taken, it may well be for sale, so that is always worth checking out. For instance, I just bought a few domains that are just sitting parked and for sale, such as: www.ChangesOnEarth.com And even if a domain isn't already up for sale, if you really want it, you can always make an offer to the current owner to buy it, and perhaps if your offer is attractive enough they will sell it to you.