CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME
Finding the right domain name is obviously a very important step in launching your new website. While not directly tied to hosting, there is an obvious connection people make between your website and your domain name. We have a lot of experience with these sorts of issues, so we will try to explain what goes into a great domain name.
There are two main strategies when it comes to choosing a domain name. We will discuss those below. There are some other concerns that should be mentioned as general rules:
- Use a .COM! A majority of people still, and probably always will, assume the .com portion of a domain name. When someone sees your results in the search engines, there is also an inherent trust given to a .com. Imagine you’re searching online and you see mywebstore.com and mywebstore.net. Which would you choose to click on first?
- Avoid trademarks. Including someone’s trademark or even being close can be an extremely dangerous domain on the Web. If you are making an Apple review site, it might be tempting to use something like HostFeat.com, but you will find if your site becomes at all popular, you will be facing legal charges. It’s best to avoid this altogether.
- Don’t use dashes or numbers. I know sometimes it seems almost impossible to find the .com domain name you really want, but don’t despair and don’t settle. Domain names with dashes or numbers are generally frowned upon by web users and also search engines. It also makes telling people about your domain difficult. For example, “Hey Steve, my site is my web store. Uhh, it has dashes between all of the words. I mean it is my dash web dash store dot com.”
Brandable Domain Name
A “brandable” domain name is a clever or unique word (or made-up word) that can be stuck in someone’s head or is different enough to make an impression. For example, let’s say you were making a website about a great host services. In our example, assuming this didn’t already exist, a great brandable name might be Host.com. This has the advantage of being short.
In general, you want to keep your brandable domains as short as possible and reasonably like a word. A domain like yytb.com while short is not very brandable compared to something like Host.com. Yes, this is obviously extreme but you see what we are getting at.
Discoverable Domains
A “discoverable” domain refers to one that is keyword rich. For our previous example of host, a great discoverable domain would be HostFeat.com. These types of domains are easy to remember, rank extremely well in the search engines, and also give you an instant idea of the content of the site. Of course, there are downsides to this approach. For one, a keyword-rich domain name is often very expensive to purchase. Also, these types of domains sometimes feel very generic and it can make them tough to market. However, this is not always the case.
Top Level Domains (TLDs)
Back to our examples.
Alexa.com, Linux.org, eLearningEuropa.info, and Yahoo.co.uk – these domains end with a different ‘extension’, namely: .com, .org, .info, .co.uk.
We call this “extension” as top level domain (shortform: TLD).
Examples of other TLD include .uk, .ws, .co.jp, .com.sg, .tv, .edu, .co, .com.my, and .mobi. While most of these TLDs are open for public’s registration, there are strict regulations on certain domain registration. For example the registration of country code top level domains (like .co.uk for United Kingdom) are restricted for the citizens of the corresponding country; and the activities with such domains website are ruled by local regulations and cyber laws.
Certain extensions of these TLDs are used to describe the ‘characteristics’ of the website – like .biz for businesses, .edu for education (schools, universities, colleagues, etc), .org for public organization, and country code top level domain names are for locations.
Country code top level domain
The full list of country code top-level domain (ccTLD) extensions are (in alphabet order):
.ac .ad .ae .af .ag .ai .al .am .an .ao .aq .ar .as .at .au .aw .ax .az .ba .bb .bd .be .bf .bg .bh .bi .bj .bm .bn .bo .br .bs .bt .bw .by .bz .ca .cc .cd .cf .cg .ch .ci .ck .cl .cm .cn .co .cr .cu .cv .cx .cy .cz .de .dj .dk .dm .do .dz .ec .ee .eg .er .es .et .eu .fi .fj .fk .fm .fo .fr .ga .gd .ge .gf .gg .gh .gi .gl .gm .gn .gp .gq .gr .gs .gt .gu .gw .gy .hk .hm .hn .hr .ht .hu .id .ie .il .im .in .io .iq .ir .is .it .je .jm .jo .jp .ke .kg .kh .ki .km .kn .kp .kr .kw .ky .kz .la .lb .lc .li .lk .lr .ls .lt .lu .lv .ly .ma .mc .md .me .mg .mh .mk .ml .mm .mn .mo .mp .mq .mr .ms .mt .mu .mv .mw .mx .my .mz .na .nc .ne .nf .ng .ni .nl .no .np .nr .nu .nz . om .pa .pe .pf .pg .ph .pk .pl .pn .pr .ps .pt .pw .py .qa .re .ro .rs .ru .rw .sa .sb .sc .sd .se .sg .sh .si .sk .sl .sm .sn .sr .st .sv .sy .sz .tc .td .tf .tg .th .tj .tk .tl .tm .tn .to .tr .tt .tv .tw .tz .ua .ug .uk .us .uy .uz .va .vc .ve .vg .vi .vn .vu .wf .ws .ye .za .zm .zw
And that’s not all. We now have more than 1,000+ generic TLDs (gTLD) opened to public, including .BAR, .BARCELONA, .BUILD, .FOREX, .CLUB, .COLLEGE, .REST, .WEBSITE, .WIEN, .XYZ, and so on. You can find the full list of top-level domains in the Root Zone Database.
Domain vs sub-domain
Take mail.yahoo.com for example – yahoo.com is the domain, mail.yahoo.com in this case, is the sub domain.
A domain must be unique (for example there can only be one single Yahoo.com) and must be registered with a domain registrar; while for sub domains, users can freely add it on top of the existing domain as long as their web host provide the service. Some would say sub-domains are the ‘third level’ domains in the sense that they are simply “sub folders” under the domain root directory, normally used to organize your website content in different languages or different categories.
However, this is not the case to many including the search engines – it is known fact that the search engines (namely, Google) treat sub domain as a different domain independent from the primary domain.
Advanced Tools
There are some useful tools that exist to help you find a domain name. We will briefly mention some of them below.
Keyword Analysis
There really is only one tool you need to know about for keyword analysis and it is Google’s Keyword Tool (which is wrapped into its AdWords tool now). This will give you the number of searches for a certain phrase per month, which is very important to tell you the size of a discoverable domains market.
Domain Name Generators
Check out some of these domain name generators to help you come up with ideas for your name.
Domain & Website Auctions
The following sites have auctions on domain names that are already registered and may even have a site on them. If you find your domain is not available, you can a lot of the time find it on one of these sites.
