Help with finding your best possible domain name

by Dee Buteland

When you have to find a domain name that is striking to go with your existing enterprise, or because you are starting up on the web, you may need some help about how to go about it.

Firstly, you will have to accept that the commonly used names – the 'beachfront properties' of cyberspace – are all already registered. Surprisingly, it is the case that all dictionary words havealready been claimed. That is because more and more users of the web have become well-informed enough to simply type a likely-sounding name into the domain address field of their browser. For example, someone looking for info about coffee, or wishing to get coffee on-line would just put coffee.com into the web address field. This gives a good result, and is faster than using any search engine. The owners of the site, of course, get large amounts of free visitors to their websites.

Such generic names – like guitar.com, ribbon.com and so on may be open to bids by their owners, but be prepared to spend a fortune to get them. I take it as read you are not in this market, which is ridiculously inflated, but wish to buy a fresh, relevant name, which fits with your enterprise or area for your new web site.

Doing it this way, there are many clever options available. Too look at them, I'll use an example. My theme for the new website I want to build is collectibles. I do a fast check, and find that all the suffixes for the word collectibles itself are already gone - .com, .net, info and so on.

One option is to add a good adjective, and so create a two-word name. Things like large-collectibles.com, discount-collectibles or golden-collectibles.com may work for your site, and still give potential visitors a good indication of what your site is about. Using free keyword tools like keyworddiscovery you can type in your keyword and find out what search terms people are using when looking for the subject.

Performing a search, words like country, cat, firefighter and so on are popular words ready to combine with 'collectibles', obviously if they respect the purpose and focus of the new site. Even MyCollectibles has a ring to it (think of myspace.com).

In some cases, this process of checking what people want will actually reveal a good idea for the theme of your new site.

However, if your business or idea has a geographical focus, you can combine that with the theme of your site – mytown-collectibles, discount-mystate-collectibles or similar.

You can also consider the option is adding a one-letter prefix. In my case, this would give me iCollectibles or eCollectibles, or the hyphenated forms, as a good set to consider. You could also use a given name in combination with the subjectof your projected site, depending on how homely you would allow your site to be – robs-collectibles.com.

Another way of proceeding is to buy a domain name with no meaning, and spend some time and money on its branding. Words like yahoo, digg and ebay are examples of this. It’s hard to believe, but these were formerly words missing from any dictionary. Who would not like to own those domains today?

About the author

To read more about finding a suitable domain, and how to profit from domains, read my page about unregistered domain names.