Tips on Domain Name Choice
By Clare Lawrence 3rd November 2003 Clare is the CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.
Before buying your domain name, give some thought to the followng:-
1) If possible utilize your sites name as the basis of your domain name e.g www.discountdomainsuk.com for Discount Domains UK. This might seem common sense but not every site follows the convention. If you use your name in your URL it will be much easier for your customers to find you.
2) Generic names if you might
register a generic domain such as toys.com thats dazzling, but most of these have already gone. Also grasping
ranked in the search engines is likely to be harder. Selected a domain closer to your advertise segment will cut down the competition. E.g toyplanes.com
3) Hyphenated Names Its brain friendly to forget the hyphen! Which is the problem, particularly if your customer remembers your name but not your URL. Though on a positive note hyphenated names are less likely to be registered already.
4) If the .com or .co.uk extension is not available then ponder the alternative TLD ( Top level domain types) such as .net or .biz. If your domain title
has already been registered then approach the owner and inquire of
if theyll sell. They might
accept a 100. If you inquire of
, they can only say no.
5) Plurals. Very commonly a domain name will be free of cost in the plural but not in the singular form. Its a personal choice, but if your prefered choice of domain name is not available you might be stuck.
6) Short or Long domains A short domain name is more memorable, but less likely to be available. A longer domain is harder to remember, but may contain more keywords which is important as some of the search engines, utilize keywords in a domain name as part of the search algorithm.
7) Which Top Level Domain Type - .com, .co.uk , .net etc This is a question I am fairly often asked. There is no evidence that any domain title
type is given preference by the search engines. However some search engines such as Google, have local searches e.g www.google.co.uk which do select local content. Customer almost always
get re-assurance from seeing a local TLD as they understand
they are dealing with a local business
etc. You can, of course, register all of them!
8) Variations If your prefered domain title
is not available then its always worth trying a prefix my e.g mydomains.com or suffix e.g domains4U.com etc
