Tips on Domain Name Choice

By Clare Lawrence 3rd November 2003 Clare is the CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain title registration service.

Before buying your domain title , give some thought to the followng:-

1) If possible use your sites title as the basis of your domain name e.g www.discountdomainsuk.com for Discount Domains UK. This might seem common sense but not every site follows the convention. If you use your name in your URL it will be much easier for your customers to find you.

2) Generic names if you can register a generic domain such as toys.com thats effective, but most of these have already gone. Also getting ranked in the search engines is likely to be harder. Selected a domain closer to your market segment will cut down the competition. E.g toyplanes.com

3) Hyphenated Names Its easy to lose your memory the hyphen! Which is the problem, particularly if your customer remembers your name but not your URL. Though on a positive note hyphenated names are less likely to be registered already.

4) If the .com or .co.uk extension is not available then ponder the alternative TLD ( Top level domain types) such as .net or .biz. If your domain name has already been registered then approach the owner and ask if theyll sell. They can accept a 100. If you ask, they might only say no.

5) Plurals. Very fairly often a domain name will be free in the plural but not in the singular form. Its a personal choice, but if your prefered choice of domain title is not available you might be stuck.

6) Short or Long domains A short domain name is more memorable, but less likely to be available. A longer domain is harder to remember, but might contain more keywords which is important as some of the search engines, utilize keywords in a domain name as part of the search algorithm.

7) Which Top Level Domain Type - .com, .co.uk , .net etc This is a question I am commonly asked. There is no evidence that any domain title type is given preference by the search engines. However some search engines such as Google, have local searches e.g www.google.co.uk which do select local content. Customer commonly get re-assurance from seeing a local TLD as they know they are dealing with a local company etc. You can, of course, register all of them!

8) Variations If your prefered domain title is not available then its always value trying a prefix my e.g mydomains.com or suffix e.g domains4U.com etc