How To Choose A Great Domain Name

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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

What’s the one make-it-or-break-it item that your online business needs to make it stand out and become a huge success?

A great domain name!

The domain name is what people enter into their browsers when they want to get to your site - it’s the part that comes after the http:// or the www. It’s your virtual real estate address. Having something they can remember without having to look it up each time or keeping it in their bookmarks, to be lost among the all the other addresses, is the best thing you can do to get visitors to return to your site and word-of-mouth free traffic.

People say that all the great names have been taken, but that’s about as as incorrect as you can get. Here are a few simple guidelines that will make your domain name — and your business — a memorable and popular web destination.

1. Choose a Dot-Com

The number one rule is, go for the dot-com ending, which is typed as .com. This is the Main Street of the virtual real estate world, and the one that most people will type in regardless of what your domain extension actually is. While .net and .org were popular for a while, and then .us, .biz,.info and .name took the stage, people always revert back to .com — irrespective of how many different country code top level domains are launched into the mainstream, like .cc, .ws, .to, .cn and others.

2. Choose A Memorable Name

You want your business name to be your domain name too, if possible. So if your flower shop is called Felicty’s Flowers, you want to get felicitysflowers.com, assuming it’s available. If that domain name isn’t available, try adding a dash, like felicitys-flowers.com or a secondary descriptive word like felicitysflowersonline.com or prettyfelicitysflowers.com. If you’re creative, you’ll easily be able to come up with something that matches your business name and is one your customers will find memorable.

Don’t forget that if you use a dash in your domain name, which some Search Engine Optimization experts say attracts more free traffic to your site, you’ll need to say the dashes if you use your domain name in an audio product or commercial; so it would be “felicitys dash flowers dot com”.

Most people who enter your domain name into their browser later will not type the dashes.

3. Get Another Name Variation

If you’re lucky enough to grab a great domain name without the dashes, then you might want to get the same name with dashes between the words as well. You can put both domain names up on your server as mirror sites to get the benefits of SEO as well as the ease of typing without the dashes.

You should also consider getting the .net or .org variation or even other domain name extensions to use as sister sites for your main dot com site… perhaps you could place your forum on the .net, or use your .com for your main product and .net for your business background information site.

Even if you’re looking for a domain name that you don’t really think will be available, using your creativity and trying a variety of word combinations ought to allow you to lock down a memorable domain name that will attract people to your website.

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It can be quite time consuming checking domain name availability as you find each successive name you come up with has already been registered.

So why not buy an expired domain name? Don’t know where to look? You’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of domain names for sale on our site: http://www.crazydomainsales.com

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