Hmmmmmmmm, how do you choose a domain name ?
That must be one of the most difficult decisions to make today, unless of course you have an unlimited cash supply. It’s a well known fact that people buy up domain names for potentially future use, cybersquatting or even domain parking. And there are now commercial companies buying up typo domains and expired domains and setting template sites just to drive click through revenue, this happened to one of my old sites and I bet you can imagine what response you get when you contact them to buy it back, nothing.
Anyway, selecting a domain name. It’s important, it helps with the brand and can help with SEO. I’ve recently gone through this process and boy was it a long painstaking task.
Brand concept and strategy
First off you need to sit down and work out what your site, service or product is trying to portray. Have a brainstorming session and try and pick out the key words, phrases, concepts that encapsulates what you are trying to do or what you want to be percieved. This is the easy part. Next focus on these key concepts and try and come up with qood quality domain names around this.
Focus on the brand and the name
Now you don’t neccessarily need to come up with a domain name that captures everything that you do.
You can select something that says on the tin what you do, for example I run a golf handicap and golf score tracking website and I registered golfscoretracker. So Golfscoretracker pretty much sums up the site.
Or you could opt for something that is related but doesn’t have to say exactly what you do. The brand then becomes very important and key to making your site memorable for returning visitors and getting across the concept.
Register the domain name
This is the hard part !
Well I’m not about to start telling anyone how to register a domain name from 44+ million sites that Google returns.
Help my domain name is taken
Yep it’s pretty likely that every good name you come up with will be taken. Here’s what I did.
First off I sat down with the domain name ideas and brand and concept words and phrases and picked out those I liked. I then extended this list by using an online Thesaurus and Dictionary to pull out ideas I hadn’t thought of.
I then ran the names through the Instant Domain Search which is a cool tool for quickly checking if names are available. Which has you can imagine most were already taken and further checks showed they had been parked for nothing of ad revenue.
So what next, thankfully there are a few more cool tools out there to come up with word phrased and suggestions that you may missed. So first off I ran my keywords through nameboy which takes 2 keywords and suggests domain words and also identifies available domains from mulitple suffixes. And to be 100% I also ran through the mutliple keywords through the Domain Name Generator which takes multiple keywords and again manipulates and provides available domain names.
There are even sites that will take words mix them up and spit out obscure variations.
That said if you really can’t be bother than just use the Web2.0 Domain Name Generator that will bring up randomn short snappy available domain names.
Good luck, hope you don’t waste as many hours as me searching for combinations checking availability and getting no where 
Oh, did I find one ? Yes I did and more information due soon. 
, | darren | 
April 28, 2007 9:06 am | 
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