Choosing Domain Names

We now take a look at the very important step of choosing a name you will spend a long time branding and building a valuable commodity with. Your website will be the online handle and the offline representation of your business and is important in so many aspects of your website project.

When looking at a domain name never get caught in what is cute or catchy for today, your name is a professional representation and will be the text below your name when people decide which of the 10 results to click on.

If we are to look at your domain simply on what is considered desirable and valuable we should look at the following rules of thumb.

Buy Short .coms only

Short non-hyphen .com's are always the first choice of any domainer. A .net .org or .info is nothing more than an advertisment for the .com version of the same name. Evertime you give out your domain verbally, you can bet they will goto the .com version everytime.

In short, only work in .com domains unti the day comes that something changes.

A good example of how this is true is that all poker websites advertising on TV advertise the .net version as a poker-school, and not a gambling website. This is because they cannot advertise a gambling site on TV. This is evidence of the fact that they base their advertising strategy on the fact that people will not type .net and end up on the .com gambling version most of the time.

Buy Keyword Domains

This rule is an on again off again truth in search engines. Yahoo used to be the one that held much stock in the keyword domain names, but as of the last update google appears to have shifted more weight into keyword filled domain names.

Based on this truth, a smart domain shopper may goto the overture keyword selector tool and enter the keyword for their niche. Then, take the highest searched term for your niche and see if you can buy the non-hyphenated .com version of that term.