Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

Before you rush out and choose your domain name or name your website, you might want to consider the following points:

1. Your Domain Name Should Be Your Website Name

Naming your site after your domain may seem obvious to some of you, but you’ll be surprised to learn that not every website is named after the domain name even when the webmaster owns that domain name.

Naming a site after its domain name is important, for the simple reason that when people think of your website, they’ll think of it by name. If your name is also your URL, they’ll automatically know where to go. For example, when people think of www.earn-money.net  they don’t have to wonder what URL to type into their browser to get there. The name of the site is also the URL.

Imagine if your business (or website) is called “Acme”, but somebody else holds that domain name. Instead, you have some obscure domain name called, say, “mybusiness.com”. What happens when your customers, recalling that Acme has a product they want, type “www.acme.com”? They’ll wind up at your competitor’s website. One lost sale.

In the modern world of the Internet, where people automatically turn to the Web for information, it pays to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. There are just fewer things for your customers or visitors to remember. Moreover, you don’t seriously think that they’ll try to memorise an unrelated URL just because you want them to, do you? The only people who’ll memorise it are you and your competitors who want to compare your prices.

What if you cannot get the domain name of your choice? It really depends on how committed you are to that particular name. If you have an existing brand name that you’re known for, you’ll probably not want to ditch that name just because you couldn’t get the domain name. After all, it took you a lot of time and money to establish that name. If so, you might simply want to try to buy over the domain name from the current owner. Check up the “whois” information for the domain, and contact that person listed to see if they’re willing to sell it. You probably should be aware that they are likely to want to charge a higher fee than you’ll normally get when buying new domains (assuming they want to sell it in the first place).

On the other hand, if you’re just starting out, you might prefer the cheaper alternative of trying to obtain a domain name first, and then naming your website (or business) after the domain that you’ve acquired. So if you’ve acquired, say, the domain name “acme.com”, then your website and business might be named “Acme” or “acme.com”. I know this seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but that’s the reality if you don’t want to lose out on the Internet.

2. Generic Names Or Brand Name Domains?

I know that a number of people seem to think that your domain name really must be some generic name like “cars.com” if you are selling cars. Witness, for example, how much money those generic names are being sold for. But seriously, if you were looking for a car, you’ll probably already have some brands in mind, and you’re more like to try out things like generalmotors.com or toyota.com rather than just cars.com.

For that reason, I personally feel that a domain name that matches your brand name is very important. The very name that you use to advertise your product is the name that you will want for your domain, because that is the first thing that people will try in their browser. It is also the easiest thing for them to remember, and whatever that is easily remembered, will be more likely to be tried out than the obscure domain name.

3. Long or Short Domain Names?

Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters. You don’t have to settle for an obscure domain name like avab.com when what you mean is AcmeVideosAndBooks.com.

Having said that, there appears to be some disagreement about whether a long or short domain name is better.

Some argue that shorter domain names are easier to remember, easier to type and far less susceptible to mistakes: for example, “getit.com” is easier to remember and less prone to typos than “connecttomywebsiteandobtainit.com”.

Others argue that a longer domain name is usually easier on the human memory – for example, “gaepw.com” is a sequence of unrelated letters that is difficult to remember and type correctly, whereas if we expand it to its long form, “GetAnEconomicallyPricedWebsite.com”, we are more likely to remember the domain name.

Some of these arguments are actually academic. It’s increasingly difficult to get short meaningful domain names. I have not checked, but I’m fairly certain that names like “getit.com” and “good.com” have long been sold. If you manage to get a short domain name though, the key is to make sure it’s a meaningful combination of characters and not the obscure “gaepw.com” in my contrived example above.

Long domain names that have your site keywords in them also have an advantage in that they fare better in a number of search engines. The latter give preference to keywords that are also found in your domain names. So, for example, if you have a site on free C++ compilers with a domain name like freecpluspluscompilers.com, it might fare better in a search for “free C++ compilers” than my other site, www.earn-money.net

Which would I go for? I’d go for the shorter name if I can get a meaningful one, but I’m not averse to longer names. However, I would probably avoid extremely long names verging on 67 characters. Aside from the obvious problem that people might not be able to remember such a long name, it would also be a chore typing it and trying to fit it as a title on your web page.

4. Hyphenated Names?

Should you get a hyphenated name? There are a few things to consider here:

a. Disadvantage: It’s easy to forget the hyphens when typing a name. Many users are used to typing things like freecpluspluscompilers.com but not free-c-plus-plus-compilers.com. They’ll probably leave out the hyphens and wind up at your competitor’s site.

b. Disadvantage: When people recommend your site to their friends verbally, having hyphens in your domain name leads to more potential errors than when the name does not contain hyphens. For example, how do you think your visitors will refer to your site if it is named “acme-books-and-videos.com”? They might say, “I visited Acme Book and Videos dot com yesterday. It was fabulous.” Their friends, remembering that comment later, might type into their browsers “acmebooksandvideos.com”. Oops.

c. Disadvantage: It’s a pain in the neck to type. Enough said.

d. Advantage: Search engines can distinguish your keywords better and thus return your site more prominently in search results for those keywords occurring in your domain name.

e. Advantage: The non-hyphenated form may no longer be available. At least this way, you still get the domain name you want.

Personally, I prefer to avoid hyphenated names if I can, but I guess it really depends on your domain name and your situation.

5. Plurals, “The”, and “My” Forms of the Domain Name

Very often, if you can’t get the domain name you want, the domain name registrar will suggest alternate forms of the name you typed. For example, if you wanted website.com, and it was taken (of course it is), it might suggest forms like:

and the like, if they were not already taken as well. The question is, should you take them?

My personal opinion is that if you take the “the…” and “my…” forms of the domain name, you must always remember to promote your site with the full form of the name. Otherwise, people are likely to forget to affix the necessary “the” or “my”. For that reason, I always advertise my sites as “and in their full domain name forms, rather than just “Free Country” or “Site Wizard” (without the article).

On the other hand, I would not take the plural form of the domain name (eg, websites.com) if I cannot also get “website.com”, since the chance of the visitor failing to type the “s” in the name is very great. Think about the famous name tussle between etoys.com and etoy.com. Many people wanting to go to etoys.com were apparently going to etoy.com instead. If it happened to them, it can happen to you too.

6. COM, ORG, NET, etc?

One common question I encounter is from people who can’t get the “.com” domain of their choice, but find the “.net”, “.org” or other country-specific top level domains (TLDs) available (like .de, .nu, .sg, etc). Should they try for these?

The answer is not as straightforward as you might think. If your website or business caters to the local community, such as a pizza delivery business or recruitment agency or the like, then it makes sense to get a country-specific domain. You actually benefit from having such a local domain because the people in your country know that they’re dealing with a local entity, which is what they want. After all, if they stay in (say) the United Kingdom, they’re not likely to want to try to order pizza from pizzaparlour.com, which suggests a US or an international site. You’ll have better luck calling it pizzaparlour.co.uk, ie, with a UK domain.

What if yours is a site or business that can benefit from an international audience? There are actually many schools of thought on this. I’ll just mention a few common ones.

The first school of thought goes on the premise that it is better to have a domain name of your choice “myperfectdomain” even if it has a TLD of “.net”, “.org” or some other country specific extension, than to wind up choosing an obscure domain name for the simple reason you can’t get your first choice. Thus they would settle for domain names like “myperfectdomain.de” or “myperfectdomain.net” or whatever. Against this is the argument that if you get a country specific domain, people might think that your business only caters to that country.

Another school of thought finds that “.net” and “.org” extensions are actually quite acceptable domain names. For some, the “.org” extension actually describes the non-profit nature of their organisation. So, for example, the famous Apache web server can be found at “apache.org”.

Others settle for the “.com” extension and no less. As grounds for their arguments, they cite the browser algorithms used to locate a website when a user simply types a name like “acme” into the browser. Apparently, the browser searches for a domain name “acme.com” before attempting “acme.net”, etc. As such, people who do that will be delivered to your competitor’s site if you do not also own the “.com” extension. Indeed, even if people do not rely on their browser to complete their typing, many simply assume a “.com” extension when they type a domain name, so if your business is “Acme”, they’ll just assume your domain name is “acme.com” rather than “acme.net” or some other such name.

As you can see, there are actually good grounds for accepting any of the above views. My personal footnote to the above arguments is that if you get a domain name with an extension other than “.com”, make sure that you promote your business or website with the full domain name. For example, if your domain name is “dogandcatfood.net”, make sure that when you advertise your site or business, call it “dogandcatfood.net” not “dogandcatfood”. Otherwise people will assume a “.com” extension and travel to the wrong place.

7. In Conclusion…

In case the forest got lost in the trees (or the reverse) in my arguments here, let me reiterate the main point of this article: get that domain name before you start your site or business.

Don’t make the mistake of attempting to retrofit your domain name to your business or website. did not originally start out with that name, and I encountered as a result of the URL changes. Don’t make that mistake too.

If you need help getting that domain name, check out my other article on how to register a domain name. In that article, I also include a list of some registrars that you can use, distinguishing the well-established ones from the less established but cheap ones (so you have a wider choice, depending on what is important to you). The article can be found at

Please don’t rush this step? If you’re trying to make money with your website, hopefully you’ve taken the time to read www.earn-money.net  first.

There is very important advice there about choosing your topic and doing the proper research and planning before you begin.

NOTE: If you already know about domain names, go here to www.earn-money.net   If not, I highly recommend you read on to understand why the name selection is so important.

There are two basic steps to getting your site online and registering/reserving a domain name is the first.

A domain name makes up the address of your site and can end in .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, .tv and more. Throughout this site you will also see the domain name referred to as the “dot com name”.

Once you have registered your name, you will select a web host (2nd step).  The web host is the guts of any website because this is where you create and publish your pages, build order forms, add functionality and maintain your site.

First, let’s focus on selecting the best domain name for your site…

Selecting The Best Domain Name

If being found in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) is important to you, I highly recommend you register a name that contains your major keywords instead of your company name. 

Think about it.  The average surfer searches by subject, not by proper name.  So why it may seem cool to have a name like TimothysToolTyme.com, you’ll want to choose a name that includes keywords that your target audience would likely use when they search.

So with that in mind, a name like Tool-Tips-for-Beginners.com would be much better than TimothysToolTyme.com. 

Sure, you can still list your company name on your web pages, but I believe it’s more important to make sure the domain name includes your important “search friendly” keywords if you want to receive traffic from all over.

Of course, you can still list your company name on the web site some place, but your domain name will include all the important keywords you’ll want to be found with.

Now, as always, there are exceptions…

If you are just creating a website for a local business, getting traffic from all over the web may not be as important to you.  This is because your customers will be local and you may want to grow your brand name in a specific area.

If this is the case, it may make more sense to register your company name and create brand awareness locally instead of trying to capitalize on search engine presence.

For example, let’s say you have a company called J.W. Reed & Co and you help people get rid of debt, but you’re based in Kansas and can only cater to residents in this area. 

Since you are only servicing local clients, you may not care if someone in California can find your site in Google since they are not likely to become one of your customers. 

In this case, it’s not as important to register a name filled with “search optimized” keywords.  You may decide to just reserve the company name, JWReedAndCo.com.

NOTE:  Keep in mind that the domain name is not the only factor weighed by search engines when deciding your rank. 

The content on your web pages and your site’s popularity (inbound links from other sites) is very important too. However, it certainly doesn’t hurt to make sure your name is optimized for maximum results.

Here are some more tips on choosing the best domain name:

1) Don’t register domain names that are too long and have too many syllables if you can help it.  Yes, you can register names up to 63 characters long, but that doesn’t mean you have to use all 63 characters.

You want your name to be easy to remember. Not everyone will bookmark your page initially so try to think of something that can be easily remembered — although I realize this may be tricky since a lot of names are taken these days.

2) Use hyphens if your name is more than 3 words long (unless your name includes 3 short words).  A name like carbuying.com doesn’t really need a hyphen because it’s readable the way it is.  

However a name like used-car-buying-scams.com looks better than usedcarbuyingscams.com since there are so many words in the name.

3) Protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, etc.)  This deters people from copying your name. For example, if you own garden-tips-for-us.com you can also register garden-tips-for-us.net and any other extension that’s available.

You don’t have to build a site on all the domains, but you can reserve the others to keep people (copycats) from registering them.

How to Register a Domain Name

Reserving a domain name is easy and very cost friendly. The big name companies like Register.com and NetworkSolutions.com charge ridiculous prices such as $30-35/year for one domain name, and you get the same service at WebsitePalace.com for much less.

It doesn’t matter where you register your domain.  Every registrar provides the same services.

You can save a bundle at www.earn-money.net  and you get a bunch of freebies such as a blog, domain forwarding and a free starter page.

You Should Protect Your Privacy

As you’re registering your name, you will be presented with the option of keeping your domain name private – a deluxe feature you’ll probably want to take advantage of.

A private domain registration will keep your information (name, email address, etc.) out of the global Internet database, and will prevent a lot of spam from reaching your email box.

Even though registering a “private” domain is not mandatory and will not block all spam, I highly recommend you select this option.  I certainly wish this had been available when I created my first site.

Top Notch Support Available

If you should ever have a question, support is available 24 hours/day, 7 days/week.

Most people that come here are new to the website creation scene.  Their number one fear is that they’ll invest their money into something that is new and unfamiliar, and then get stuck with no one to help them should they have a question.  Well, that’s not going to happen here.

It is understood that many of you may be new to this and should you ever have a question you can call or email us at anytime. 

Phone support is available around the clock and WebsitePalace’s dedicated customer service team makes every effort to answer emails within a 10-12 hour period.  

Freebies for Starting Your Site at WebsitePalace.com

Your Getting Started Guide

Almost all domain registrars and web hosting companies are notorious for taking your order, sending you a welcome email and leaving you to figure out how to get started.

At WebsitePalace.com, that’s not going to happen.

To help you along, I’ve created a step by step guide that will not only walk you through launching your site or blog, but I provide tips on generating traffic and making money from your site. There are even instructions for setting up a blog.

It’s perfect for newbies.

When you buy your domain name(s) at www.earn-money.net  you’ll get this free book to help you setup your account and prepare to launch your site and/or blog.

The manual is an electronic book (PDF) and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.

Most computers already have this program installed, but just in case you don’t, you can download www.earn-money.net

Note: The download link to the book is on the order confirmation page after you’ve placed your order – so don’t miss it!

If you register a www.earn-money.net  or buy anything from WebsitePalace.com by August 1, 2009, I will provide this book for free.

Free e-Book Software

(Windows Users Only!)

Order any product from Website www.earn-money.net  2CreateAWebSite.com will provide you with this free e-book software. (Windows users only.)

This easy-to-use program will allow you to create electronic (downloadable) books that you can sell or give away from your website. 

All you do is develop the contents of your book on your computer using your favorite software (Word, Notepad, etc.) and this software will convert the files into a download-friendly book you can offer to your website visitors!  There’s even an option to password protect it if you wish.

Note: The download link to the templates is on the order confirmation page after you’ve placed your order – so don’t miss it!

70+ Design Templates – FREE!

One of my pet peeves with web hosts is that they don’t offer any help for first-time website builders. 

I think they fail to realize a large percentage of their customers are new to website development.

Well I understand that you may be a beginner and you probably need some assistance. So if you register your domain name or purchase any product from Website www.earn-money.net  I will provide over 70+ HTML templates for you to choose from to begin your site.

You simply choose the design you want and edit the text accordingly. Template setup instructions are provided with the download file.

Note: The download link to the templates is on the order confirmation page after you’ve placed your order – so don’t miss it!

Free Walk-Through Video

You will get access to an online video of me using my own Website Palace account (yes, I’m a customer too). This will give you an idea of how to set up your website, blog, shopping cart or whatever you want to do with your site.

Think any other website is going to do anything like this? Think again!

FREE Affiliate Tutorial With Every Order

Did you know that even if you are creating a personal website, you can place Google ads on your site and earn money?

Or you can recommend other company’s products and get paid a commission when people buy as a result of your referral?

This is called Affiliate Marketing.

I’ve been doing this with every website I create and it’s the simplest way to earn money on the web when you don’t have a product of your own to sell. 

If you like to exercise, build an information website about fitness and link to products related to health and exercise.  If you like food, build a recipe site and link to companies that sell cookbooks, kitchen gadgets and more.

The Affiliates Masters Course is a one-of-a-kind guide that shows you where to find affiliate programs like the ones described above and you’ll discover how to maximize your earnings no matter the topic of your site.  

I promise you. This is not some cheesy, info-product that shows you how to make money overnight.  There’s no such thing as “fast cash” and that’s not what this eBook is about.

It’s a very well-written tutorial jam-packed with solid, detailed information that will show you how to profit from your website by linking to and referring products and services offered by other companies.

This guide is over 200 pages and has an $80 value.  It will be yours for free when you register any domain name.

If you register  www.earn-money.net by August 1, 2009 this FREE, Affiliate Masters Course is all yours.

Another Free Offer – Domain Forwarding

You will also receive a free domain forwarding account with every domain name.  This comes in handy if you want to register multiple extensions like .com, .net, .org, .info, .tv, .us, etc.

For example, you can create your site on the .com domain, and have the .net extension automatically forward to your .com site.  So when someone types in yourdomain.net, you can set it up to automatically redirect to the .com version of your site (or vise versa). 

PLEASE NOTE: If you decide to do this, you’ll need to register both the .com and .net extension of the domain (or any other extension you’ll want to use to redirect to your main site.)

Domain Forwarding used to be priced at $16.99 per year, but for a limited time WebsitePalace.com is offering it for FREE!

More Freebies

If you register your domain with Website www.earn-money.net  you will also receive the following items…

• Free Blog
• Free Starter Page
• Free Parked/For Sale Page
• Free Domain Locking
• Free Domain Status Alerts

It’s Time to Register Your Domain . . .

Register www.earn-money.net  but before you leave this tutorial you may want to read about the 2nd step in creating a website – selecting www.earn-money.net  (recommended).   You cannot build your pages until you have a web host.

That may save you from having to come back here to learn about web hosting, and you’ll be able to take care of steps 1 and 2 all at once when you register your domain(s).

However, if you want to reserve your domain now and come back to this tutorial to read about step 2 later, go to Website www.earn-money.net  now or search the database for an available name by using the search box below.

New! Watch a Video Demonstration of Registering a Domain & Selecting a Web Host

This is a screenshot www.earn-money.net demonstrates registering a domain name and selecting a web host at WebsitePalace.com.

When the query arrives at the caching server there is a good chance that this server knows the answer already because it has remembered it, “cached” in DNS terminology, from a previous transaction. So if someone using the same caching server has sent mail to someone at ‘ripe.net’ recently, all the information that is needed will already be available and all the caching server has to do is to send the cached answers to your computer. You can see how caching speeds up responses to queries for popular names considerably. Another important effect of caching is to reduce the load on the DNS as a whole, because many queries do not go beyond the caching servers.

The purpose of the DNS is to enable Internet applications and their users to name things that have to have a globally unique name. The obvious benefit is easily memorizable names for things like web pages and mailboxes, rather than long numbers or codes. Less obvious but equally important is the separation of the name of something from its location. Things can move to a totally different location in the network fully transparently, without changing their name. www.isoc.org can be on a computer in Virginia today and on another computer in Geneva tomorrow without anyone noticing.

In order to achieve this separation, names must be translated into other identifiers which the applications use to communicate via the appropriate Internet protocols. Let’s look at what happens when you send a mail message to me at daniel.karrenberg@ripe.net. A mail server trying to deliver the message has to find out where mail for mailboxes at ‘ripe.net’ has to be sent. This is when the DNS comes into play.

The mail server transmits this question, called a ‘query’ in DNS terminology to the DNS. Quickly it receives as answer:

ripe.net. 1800 IN MX 100 postman.ripe.net.
ripe.net. 1800 IN MX 150 postboy. ripe.net.

“Mail for ‘ripe.net’ should be sent first to the computer called ‘postman.ripe.net’. If ‘postman.ripe.net’ is not available, try ‘postboy.ripe.net’”.

The mail server will now make a connection with ‘postman.ripe.net’. In order to do this it needs to know the numeric Internet address for ‘postman.ripe.net’. This numeric address is sufficient to send Internet packets directly to the computer called ‘postman.ripe.net’ from anywhere in the Internet. Again the DNS is queried and it returns ’193.0.0.199′.

postman.ripe.net. 172800 IN A 193.0.0.199

From here on, the mail server delivering your message can directly communicate with the mail server that receives and stores my mail for me to collect later on.

It is obvious that the information we just obtained in our example cannot come from a central list somewhere. This list would simply be too large, change too often and its repository would be quickly overwhelmed with queries.

Dear Experts,

This is not for you. For the sake of explaining principles we will often generalise and do this sometimes to the point where our explanations are not strictly correct in every last detail. The relevant Internet standards are where you find the details.

So you have an idea of a website and you even found the name.com you would like to use?
You have to check first if that name is already taken. Some site like www.dotdnr.com will do that for you.
That is what is called a domain name. Domain name can end with .com .net .org .biz .(country) like .ca .us .jp .fr etc… that is up to you to choose and also what is available.

So you might want guitar.com, but when you look up that name you realize that it is already taken. But, looking further you find out that guitar.ca (which is means Canada) is available and you are Canadian and that you are actually selling guitars and related goods in Canada. So this is a good deal for you.

You might also come across domain names that are taken but not used. This means that someone bought the name but is not using it and is willing to sell it to anyone for a price.

Some hosting services offer in their deal to register you for free or with a small fee. So it is a good idea to read about your hosting provider before you go on and register your domain name. But still if you already have your domain name and join a hosting service, you can import your domain name to your account.

One thing that you should consider when choosing a domain name is to pick a name that is related to your website primary keywords. If your website is about domain name and your name is Peter, your domain name should be something like domain-name.com or peter-domain-name.com, try to avoid peter.com or petersplace.com because one of the many factors search engines are looking for to get a good ranking is keywords in the domain name of your website