How to choose a domain name

Your domain name, your web space, and your web concept are all inter-related and it will pay you in the long run to make sure you have selected the right domain name and the right web host for your website concept at the beginning.

Take some time to figure out what the purpose of your site is, who you are trying to get to your site, and what is the most effective name for that purpose.

The selection of your domain name is one of the keys to making your site successful. Basically there are two ways to go: a brandable name or a keyword name.

A keyword name is one that contains words or phrases based on common internet search terms. So if you were planning a guitar repair site your domain name would include the phrase guitar repair in the name. Keyword names can get rather long, whether that’s good or bad will depend mostly on your marketing methods.

A brandable name is like Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. These are names that in the beginning did not tell the user what the site was about but through promotion have become household words . Just like Coca Cola and McDonald’s in the real world, these names come to signify the product over time. Note that these names are easy to remember and pass on by “word of mouth.”

An example of a brandable name is the domain name for this web site. BizAddy.com was chosen to allow branding over time. It is a made up word combining the “biz” abbreviation for business and the “addy” nickname for address.

The choice of name extension is also very important. The dotcom extension is the way to go still , with dotnet a distant second. Everything else is an also ran unless you are a charitable organization and then the dotorg is appropriate. But if you go with dotorg, don’t forget to register the dotcom domain name also to prevent others from profiting from your name.

Our favorite domain name registrar, GoDaddy. is well known to most everyone on the internet.