So you want to start up a website?  Have you thought about your long term plans for your website?  Doing so will be a great advantage in determining the best possible domain name.  Careful consideration of your website’s domain name can pay off in dividends once your website is published online. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.

OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it.  Can you still get it?  Maybe.  It’s possible, but there are conditions.  With some research and hard work you can still possibly register that coveted domain name even if someone has beaten you to the punch.  But for now, lets look at some alternatives to getting that domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com.  Is it always the best strategy?  Yes and no.  For example, if the domain name you want is already taken AND well known, most likely this is not a good idea, because most web surfers would likely just type the non-hyphenated version into their browsers and thus could end up at your competitor’s website.  Not the desired result!  Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website.  So keep it short.  Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up.  After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic.  In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy.

Longer or Shorter?  If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name.  You could purchase a domain name like thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com which is 63 characters long, but why would you want to do that?  Who would want to type it into a browser?  My website is www.StartMyWebsiteToday.com    When choosing my domain name I wanted something that in a few words would tell the web surfer what to expect from my website.  Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking.  When choosing your domain name try to keep it short and concise, and if at all possible let the name tell the story of the site.  Shorter is better here.

Brand Name or Generic  The answer here is it depends.  If your business is known by a brand name, and it is a well known name, of course it is the best possible strategy to try to register that domain name.  Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer.  But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website.  If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name.  But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well.  People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names.  A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike.  Research your domain name as thoroughly as you can, including looking for generic keywords which could be a good fit as a potential domain name.  You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better.   A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one.  To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine.