How to chose your own domain name in depth

A domain name is a must have. To be taken seriously online you will need to have your own domain name (eg: www.yoursite.com).
This is your identity and how people will find you. People are more likely to trust you if you are john@mybusinessgoal.com than johnh@hot-mail.com

Your domain is made up of a number of words and numbers. Now there are several options around like .biz .info .net .tv and others. Should you use one of these or even a country based one like Australia's .com.au ?

First question you need to ask before getting a country option is do I only want to sell to that one country? Even if you do you should look at getting a .com (dot-com) name as well as a country based name.

It gives you the look of a big trustworthy company.

Dot com names have several advantages:

1. Seen as the industry standard for big business -in-creases your image
2. Se-arch en-gines seem to like them better
3. Public perception is better

Lets look at it this way, when you think of a site online, do you think of thesite.com (dot com) first? Most likely and probably so do your best possible customers.

Now we move on to what words you want to have in your domain, you need to look over potential "Keywords" to include in it.

Keywords (or keyword phases) are words people use to look for your type of business.

To choose the best keywords for your name you need to know what people are searching for online:

1. Good Keywords ( http://www.goodkeywords.com ) This piece of fr-ee software will give you results of words and amounts per month being searched in Overture.com one of the bigger Pay Per Clic-k se-arch en-gines.

2. Digitalpoint.com -This site does a comparison to the too major tools for keywords, overture and wordtracker-(wordtracker.com is a paid keyword tool) here are the results for news:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/?keywords=news

Lets do an example -Lets say I am doing a site on martial arts:

From overture here are the results:

martial art,143576
martial art supply,25797
art martial trickz,4461
martial art equipment,3716
martial art video,1837
martial art school,1595

So this gives me an idea what searchers are looking for so possible domains could be: MartialArtsupply.com or MartialArtEquipment.com

The actual domain name would be based on what I was doing, am I selling equipment so maybe: MartialArtEquipment4Sale.com

From here there are 3 other things to consider:

1. The use of hyphens
2. Availability of names
3. Listing in directory's vs Search engines

Hyphens - hyphens gives more options with our choices. In our example above I could use:

Martial-Art-Equipment-4-Sale.com or Just -Martial-Art-Equipment. com or My-Martial-Art-Equipment.com

Hyphens are ok for businesses when you don't need to explain them in a verbal way, so if you plan to advertise on the radio then they are not for you. But if most of your visitors would clic-k on a link online, then it's an easy way to read and helps with availability of names.

Availability - Sometimes you may need to search for variations on your keyword, so to keep your options open

DirectNic ( http://www.directnic.com )allows you to search for a name and then generates a whole large list of similar available names.

Listing in directory's vs Search engines - Search engines seem to prefer keywords within the domain name, depending on which mark-eting expert you listen too, It helps your chances of a high ranking. (Links to sites are becoming a major feature in who comes up first but that's a whole new subject. )

Directory's tend to be slightly different in their approach, normally listings are decided by alphabetical order, with numbers first.

Yahoo.com is the most well know of directories.(listings are decided by humans and then web search results follow) At the moment when you search at yahoo results directory results come up first followed by any web results.

Listings in directories have add-ed bon-uses in that these count as links to your site especially since these are prominent sites.

So using our example: Martial Art Equipment would be best using:

1-Martial-Art-Equipment.com or 1st -Martial-Art-Equipment.com would be the best option.

In this case we have a good keyword type name which should be listed first in Directory's like Yahoo and Dmoz.org. These directories are awake to this, so when you list your domain, its best to use the company name as the same as your domain. So when I am asked for a "registrant" I will use 1st -Martial-Art-Equipment.com as the name of the owner.

Yahoo explains more of this here: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

You domain is your presence online and should not be taken likely so take some time to think about how you want to seen. Hope this helps

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