Easy To Spell
Ever heard an ad on the radio in which the Web address for the company is spelled out to you? The lack of good domains over the past few years has lead many companies to secure what might be regarded as "nonsense" names. If you find yourself spelling your site's name to people, you've got it wrong.
If you want people to remember you, they must be able to remember your site as a word. Again, words are easy to remember. This immediately outlaws the use of "unnatural" spellings, of course, so don't replace S with Z under any circumstances!
Also, be careful about double letters. Take CyberRadio2000, for example. Their domain uses a double R, as you might expect, but there is an uncertainty there. The two Rs together look a bit strange if written without capitalisation, and a good name will not force the user to assume anything about the name. Of course, if you really must have a double letter, the best solution is to buy both versions of the domain, but it's not ideal.
Avoid using dashes in your domain name wherever possible. It's a great way to find a good name that hasn't been registered, but can make your domain even more difficult to remember. Keep to a maximum of one dash and, if at all possible, none.
Descriptive
A good site or business name will describe exactly what the site is about. Consider the "real world" example of the Royal Mail in the UK. In an infamous marketing move, the company was renamed Consignia. Now what does that mean? If I said the name Consignia to you, you wouldn't associate it with letters and parcels. In fact, Consignia have since discovered this, and renamed themselves, "The Royal Mail Group"! It just goes to show that, though a "made up" corporate name might be flashy or cost a lot of money to create, it's not necessarily your best option. Such names don't make it immediately obvious what you do, and surely that's the whole point of a name.
Of course, many companies have succeeded using a non-descriptive name: "Egg", the online bank; "elephant.co.uk" (car insurance); and "Orange", the mobile phone firm. How did they make these names successful? Through huge marketing campaigns designed to establish brand awareness. But surely it's better to have an instantly-recognisable purpose than to have to spend millions to tell people what you do?
Keywords
An interesting use of domain names has now begun to appear: keywords. To give an example, I started the site Free-Webhosting.info and within two months it was number two on Google for a search on "free Webhosting". I had very few external links to my site, and hadn't done any real optimisation for the search engines.
But my ranking wasn't just a fluke. Other sites I have worked on have achieved very high search engine rankings by having a search term as their domain. With no real technique for obtaining high rankings as easily on engines like Google, this could be just what Webmasters are looking for.
Finding A Name
Now that you know what to look for in a name, it's time to start the search! You might already have an idea of a name you could register, but unless you are very creative, you'll probably find that it's already been taken (unless, of course, you're registering a company name which isn't comprised of generic words).
You could spend the next week typing names into Whois searches, or you could try a domain generator like Domain tools. Just type in your keywords and instantly receive many domain suggestions, all of which have been checked for availability as .com, .net and .org (and sometimes .info if the system is working). Using your new-found knowledge, you will soon be able to find a great name for your site.
Register It!
That's it -- you've bought a domain for your site! It's easy to remember, spell and type. It's short, memorable and descriptive, and best of all, it's yours. Now you have your key to Website success, and all that remains to be done is the design, content, promotion, backend development...
