You should not hurry to buy the first domain name that crosses your mind. Like anything in life, this requires a little bit of thought. I outlined in this article the most important things you should think of in order to choose a good domain name.Intro Today, registering a domain name is not an expensive thing. But that was not the case a few years ago. It was the fierce competition that lowered the prices, despite the fact that the demand had grown noticeably too. Most businesses and many individual people have a domain name of their own. If a domain name is for a personal site, most of the tips that I give here are not particularly useful, but if that domain name is for a website that has to generate revenue, then you should definitely read this article and learn how to choose a good domain name. Various thoughts Surprise! Internet's population keeps on getting smarter. And pickier! People expect a business website to have its own domain. Luckily, it's so cheap to register a domain name, that this shouldn't be a problem. Even with the most expensive registrar you will not pay more than $30 to own that domain name for whole year. Most registrars though, will charge under $15 per year. So far it's simple! To get your site to be respected by other people you must prove that you respect it yourself. That's why you should choose a good domain name and register it. For those of you not yet sure about buying a domain name, I will present some of the other benefits of a domain name. For instance, if you decide to change hosts, you'll not lose all those money and the effort invested to make you website's URL popular (URL=Universal Resource Locator; e.g. yahoo.com). You'll be free to choose whatever host you like, because the URL to your website will remain the same: your domain. If you would've used a subdomain given by your host, changing the host, would've meant changing the URL too. Another reason to register a domain name: people. The shorter the URL, the easier it can be remembered! It's not hard to realize which is easier to recall between www.yourwebsite.yourhost.com and www.yourwebsite.com. And that's not everything. You have to take into account the fact that most people type the URLs in their browser. Yes, you will say that doesn't happen very often, but statistics showed that in 2001 about 52% of all sites received their visitors this way. Huh? - you might say. What about the search engines? Well, it's simple. People do search for new sites in the search engines, but once they find those sites, they remember them - if they have easy to remember domain names, of course. And they type the URL directly in their browser when they want to revisit. Conclusion? Get a domain name for your website. But not any domain. Choose a good domain name, a catchy one! One that tells what your site is about or with what it is different from other similar sites. Make it easy to remember! A website's name is much like a person's name. If it's easy to remember then it's easy to refer to it (and recommend it). In a certain sense it's more important, because you can point out a certain person by, lets say, his father's or brother's name, but on the Internet it's virtually impossible to point out a site in any way without referring to it's domain name (excepting the IP address, but we can't consider that an option). Think about the domain name like it would be a child's name. Once set, you can't change your mind (you can, but you really don't want to go through all that trouble). So you must choose a good domain name, one that will last for a lifetime. To improve the ranking in the indexes and other lists of sites, it would be a good idea to choose a domain name that starts with "a" or "b", or even better, with a number, like in the these examples: "123money.com", "allaboutbooks.net", "autosubmission.org". Note that these are just examples. I don't know if they are already registered and I don't have any affiliation with any of them in case they exist. But I can tell you that the people who registered them (if anyone) have done a great job in selecting the name (if it is content related of course). A domain name is as short as possible. That makes it easy to remember. As a rule, a good domain name has under 15 characters. That's should be enough for two or three words. A very touted idea is to choose a domain name that includes your most important keywords. The idea is that the search engines give you a boost in the search results for the words included in the domain name. However, experience proved that this isn't such an important factor in the search engines' algorithm. Most search engines do take these the words in the domain name into account, but it seems that they don't consider these words to be more important than those included in the page. That's why I recommend to stick to the short domain names and, but only if possible, try to include some of your most important keywords. Long domain names are rather annoying and harder to remember than shorter ones. Oh! I almost forgot! If you want the search engines to be able to read the keywords that you include in your domain's name you have to use hyphens. That means you should register my-most-important-keywords.com, not mymostimportantkeywords.com. Hyphens though, make an otherwise good domain name become difficult to read, and thus difficult to remember. "My hyphen most hyphen important hyphen keywords dot com" is definitely hard to remember. :-) If you're trying to choose a good domain name for a business selling white widgets, then go for whitewidgets.com, not whitewidget.com. In my examples I kept on using "dot com". And I recommend you to choose a ".com" domain name for a website that markets products in US or internationally. Otherwise I recommend using ".au" for example, if you're marketing in Australia. Final words Now that you know how to choose a good domain name, put on paper every single domain name that crosses your mind. Then select those that you feel to be the best and see if and which ones are still available. You can find that out at any domain registering service by trying to register the domain. If someone else has registered it already, you will get a message such as "the domain is not available". Well, that's about it. I hope you learned something today. If you have any questions, please e-mail me. Oh, here's a short list places where you can buy a domain name online: www.GoDaddy.com
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