Suggestions for selecting a great domain name

If you want to find a good domain name to go with your existing enterprise, or because you are starting up on the web, you may need advice about the best way to do it.

First, you must accept that the most obvious names – the 'beachfront properties' of the internet – are all already acquired by someone else. Today, it is the case that every dictionary word hasalready been claimed. The reason for that is more and more web users have become well-informed enough to simply type a likely name into the address field of their browser. For example, someone looking for info about coffee, or wishing to get coffee on-line would just enter coffee.com into the URL field. This gives an acceptable result, and is faster than using google. The owners of the site, of course, get huge amounts of traffic to their web properties.

These kinds of names – like fruit.com, resume.com and so on may be open to approaches by their owners, but be prepared to spend hundreds, or millions of dollars. I take it as read you are not in this market, which is ridiculously inflated, but wish to buy a new, relevant name, which fits with your enterprise or theme for your new website.

Doing it this way, there are many smart ways to proceed. Too look at them, I'll use an example. My theme for the new internet site I want to build is collectibles. I do a fast check, and find that all the dot suffixes for the word collectibles itself are gone - .com, .net, info and so on.

One option is to add a relevant adjective, and create a two word name. Things like fine-collectibles.com, discount-collectibles or golden-collectibles.com may be a good fit for your site, and still give users a good indication of what your web site is about. Using free keyword tools like keyworddiscovery you can type in your keyword and actually discover what search terms your audience is using when looking for the subject.

Performing a search, words like country, cat, firefighter and so on are well-used words available to combine with 'collectibles', depending on whether they are in accord with the purpose and focus of the projected web site. Even MyCollectibles has a ring to it (think of myspace.com).

Sometimes, this method of discovering what people want will actually reveal a worthwhile idea for the focus of your new site.

However, if your business or idea has a geographical element, you can use that element with the focus of your site – mystate-collectibles, cheap-mytown-collectibles or similar.

Or, a useful option is adding a one letter prefix. For my subject, this would give me iCollectibles or eCollectibles, or the hyphenated forms, as a good set to investigate. You could also use a given name in combination with the themeof your projected site, depending on how homely you would allow your enterprise to be – marys-collectibles.com.

Another, and completely different option is to buy a domain name with no meaning, and spend some effort on its branding. Words like google, orbitz, expedia and netscape are examples of this. It’s hard to believe, but these were formerly words unknown to any dictionary. Who would not like to own those domains now?

To read more about finding a suitable domain, and how to profit from domains, read my page about domain names.