How to choose a domain name

Choosing a domain name is always a challenge. We all want a cool 4 letter domain name, but unfortunately all the good meaningful ones are taken. If you fail to choose a right domain name, it sometimes may lead to disastrous outcome, sometimes it can put you out of business, example, expertsexchange.com (mispronounced as expert-sex-change.com for experts-exchange.com), give wrong ideas, cummingfirst.com (website of Cumming First United Methodist Church, in Cumming, Georgia), and sometimes are pronounced wrongly, machome.com (pronounced as macho-me.com for mac-home.com).

We decide on the domain name and when we look for the availability of the domain, to our disappointment, most of the time they are taken,we give up and opt for a ordinary, me too domain name of which, we ourselves might not be happy about. Here are a few tips on how to go about choosing a domain name and avoid mistakes :

1. Brainstorm
Before you start know exactly why you want the domain name for, might be personal blog, business, selling page etc. This gives you a direction on how to proceed.
Make of list of

• Synonyms and Related Words : look for synonyms and related words of the keyword. If say you have a ipod accessories store, you can add ‘Ipod’, ‘Apple’, ‘MP3 Player’ etc to the list
• Phrases : Look for phrases which sends out the meaning, your customers need know of your busniess, of what you are doing. Example: paypal.com, greguide.com. You may also want to choose a phrase which represents your values, quality of service you offer, example, oneminutehowto.com
• Equivalent word in other Languages : Look for equivalent words in other languages, if you are lucky domain name will be available for that word and might also sound good.
• Choose a Nickname : If the website is for personal purpose, choose your nickname as the domain name, even companies like infosys use infy.com
• Choose Short-forms : choose an abbreviated or short form of your company name, example imdb.com(for Internet Movie Database)
• Add something : Sometimes adding a word or two to your keyword, and even repeating the same word can land you a good domain name, example, allmovie.com , boingboing.net
• Add personal touch : As domain name will be invariably associated with your business, especially if yours is C2C or C2B, adding personal touch can play wonders and keep your visitors coming back to your site, example, treehugger.com

2. Things to avoid

• Do not to have numbers, hyphens, as it is difficult to remember and market.
• Check for its meaning in other languages, at least the ones where you plan to do business in the near future and make sure it is not misleading
• Check if it can be misspelled : Check if the domain name can be pronounced in a different way or mispelled, this may lead to hilarious domain names, example: whorepresents.com
• Avoid Descriptive Names: Try to avoid long desciptive domain names, they are usually too long to remember and too long to type. Avoid names like thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com
• Use standard TLDs like .com, .org and you might also want to use .net , avoid TLDs like .info, .org.in etc as they are easy to forgot or get confused.

3. Check for availability

This is something which you need to be careful about. Use a trustworthy whois to check for domain name availabilty as there have been reports saying that even websites like networksolutions.com have defrauded. I would recommend whois.net and betterwhois.com based on my experience to check domain name availability.

Finally, see to it that the domain name has majority, if not all of the following qualities

• short
• memorable
• not easily confused
• hard to misspell
• related to your business

All the best for your domain name purchase!

Related posts

• Web Hosting for Starters #Part 1
• Domain Name Scam
• How to choose a web host?
• Web Hosting for Starters #Part 2
• Search engines are search engines and that is all.

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