Selecting a DomainBe Prepared to Spend Time Researching Alternatives

Why is My Choice of Domain Name Important?• You have a purpose in creating a website, your domain

needs to convey that purpose.• You want your domain to be unique to distinguish from

other websites with a similar message or product.• You want folks to be able to find your website.• You want folks to be able to remember your website.• You want folks to take you seriously.• When folks find your website, you want them to spend

as much time as possible reading your content.

Use Creative Thinking or Mind Mapping• Think of several terms or phrases related to the theme

your website or blog.• Put them together in various combinations with prefixes

and suffixes to create a list of candidate domain names.

Make Your Domain Unique

• You want to stand out from the crowd.• Don’t chose domain names that are similar to other

domain names by adding hyphens or pluralizing an existing domain.• Folks get really angry when they show up at your

website when they were intending to go to some other popular website. This does you no good and can do lots of harm to your reputation.

Choose Only Dot-Com Domains

• Dot-Com is the gold standard. It’s the norm.• Most folks automatically assume Dot-Com when trying

to find a website.

Make It Easy To Type

• Don’t get tricky with spelling.• Use easy-to-type letters. Try typing in the domain

yourself before choosing it.

Make It Easy To Remember

• It does you no good to have a great website if no one can remember the name so they can’t share it with their friends.

Keep The Name as Short as Possible• Short names are easy to type and easy to remember. • Try to keep it under 15 characters.• Short name fits better on business cards.

Don’t Deceive

• Make your domain match the theme of your website.• Make your domain intuitive.

Don’t Infringe on Copyrights

• There is no up-side to copyright infringement.• Most folks are fair-minded and won’t do business with

someone who is clearly encroaching.

Don’t Use Hyphens and Numbers• Use of Hyphens and numbers makes the domain hard to

remember and hard to type and hard to convey verbally.

Don’t Get Cutsey

• You want folks to take you seriously.• Folks might not get your sense of humor.• What you think is funny might be offputting.

Avoid Use of Names Related to a Specific Geographic Region• You might move.• You might want to sell your business to someone in a

different geographic region.• The geographic area might get a bad reputation.

I’ve Found the Perfect Domain But It’s Already Taken• One of the most daunting aspects of searching for the

“perfect” domain is that most of the good domain names are already taken.• You may need to evaluate numerous possibilities before

you find a domain name that you like that has not been registered.