Website Tutorial — Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

Many ideas for gen­er­at­ing alter­nate income include build­ing a web­site (which includes blogs).   In most cases, you will need a domain name, such as learn4me.com.  Choos­ing a domain name can be chal­leng­ing since many of the “.com” sites have been taken and it is dif­fi­cult to come up with a name that is:

1. Mem­o­rable — This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant qual­ity of a domain name you pick because you want to choose a name that is easy for peo­ple to remem­ber so that when they hear it, they will be able to eas­ily recall it.  This is espe­cially true if they hear of your web­site by word of mouth, or in your non-Internet based adver­tise­ments, mar­ket­ing lit­er­a­ture, etc.
2. Con­tains Key­words — Your domain name should con­tain key­words or syn­onyms of key­words per­ti­nent to your web­site because it is more search engine friendly — i.e., search engines like domain names that are closely related to a website’s content.
3. Not too long — In my opin­ion, the shorter the bet­ter while still con­tain­ing the key­words relat­ing to your website’s con­tent.  Shorter length domain names make it eas­ier for your cus­tomers to remem­ber and type with­out mistakes.
4. Avoid Spe­cial Char­ac­ters — I rec­om­mend avoid­ing the use of spe­cial char­ac­ters like under­scores and hyphens — again because they are dif­fi­cult to remem­ber and to type cor­rectly.  You want it as easy as pos­si­ble for cus­tomers to reach you, so remove any bar­ri­ers such as dif­fi­cult char­ac­ters that can get in the way.

I recently read a good arti­cle about choos­ing domain names that rein­forces the rec­om­men­da­tions above.

Under­stand­ing the prin­ci­ples, what are some good tools avail­able for choos­ing a good domain name that sat­isfy the rec­om­men­da­tions above?  One of the best tools I have found for choos­ing a domain name is Instant Domain Search.

This tool is extremely fast and will tell you if a domain is taken as you type.  It has the nice fea­ture that it does not record domain names you type, so that the poten­tial of some­one else grab­bing your domain name before you can reg­is­ter it is min­i­mized. For addi­tional secu­rity, you can even encrypt domain name searches with this tool. Their web­site also has some help­ful infor­ma­tion about the domain reg­is­tra­tion process.

If you use iGoogle, the Instant Domain Search can be included on your iGoogle site by click­ing “Add stuff” and search­ing for “Inter­net Domain Search”. Since iGoogle is my home page, this put the tool in a con­ve­nient place for me since I have been able to use this tool when­ever I have had the inspi­ra­tion for a great domain name and want to see if it has already been taken. Instant Domain Search even offers the capa­bil­ity of embed­ding their search wid­get (that is, cus­tomized HTML code) on your site to increase your own web­site traffic.

The Instant Domain Search can be a bit frus­trat­ing when you dis­cover that your clever domain names have already been taken. An extremely good tool for for com­ing up with addi­tional ideas for domain names is the Google Won­der Wheel. I first dis­cov­ered this tool in a post on Problogger.net.  Dar­ren Rowse explains the Google Won­der Wheel in the con­text of com­ing up with ideas for posts on a blog, but the won­der wheel can also be used to come up with good domain names as well.

Another tool — also from Google — that might be help­ful for com­ing up with good domain names is the key­word tool they sup­ply with Adwords/Adsense.  The extra ben­e­fit of using the key­word tool is that you can also see how the pop­u­lar each word and/or phrase is the Google searchers.

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