Methods For Coming Up With a Great Domain Name

When it comes to buying a domain name for yourself, there are a few goals that literally every person or company has in common. Since the point of getting a domain name in the first place is to set up an online presence, one of the main goals that many people have is to create an image for themselves or for their company.

It is important for a domain name to be memorable, and it is also important that it contain at least one keyword related to the topic of your site. (This rule about the domain name containing keywords wouldn't apply to really short names, but most of those are already taken and those that are available are selling for thousands of dollars, so I am assuming that you are interested in finding and registering a brand new domain name.)

A good pace to start is to pick a good domain registrar such as GoDaddy and use the search engine they have on the main page to try out different combinations of words related to your topic to see if any are available. There are millions of domain names registered with the top-level COM (as I'm sure you already know, .com is the most popular ending or top-level for domain names), so the chances of you finding a generic one or two word domain name ending in .com are slim to none.

In this article I am going to discuss a few different methods you can use to find a desirable domain name that is relevant to your topic, that is memorable to your visitors, and that is not already registered by somebody else.

The first tactic that you might be interested in has to do with choosing arbitrary dictionary words. This is one possible way to still find a short (under 8 letters) domain name that is already taken, and what you will want to do is come up with a short, unrelated word that could possibly make a good name for your website. Social bookmarking sites are the main contenders that are currently using this tactic, and some of the more notable examples of websites that have done this successfully are Yahoo and Amazon.

Depending on the scope of your business and online operations, trademark protection is something that may be relevant to you. This strategy of locating short, arbitrary and unrelated words to use as a domain name can be very beneficial for copyright and trademark protection because there is a very good chance that nobody has ever used that word as a trademark before.

Think about Google. If you have read the book called The Google Story, you know that the two Stanford guys registered "Google.com" by accident when they really meant to get "Googol," as that is the correct spelling of the word. For that reason, Google is now very secure in their trademark, and if you can come up with some kind of cutesy variation of a short, arbitrary word like that then you might have one heck of a domain name.