What are the best techniques in choosing a domain name?

[kittychuk]

Which type domain name is good?

1. Keywords Related

2. No Keywords

3. Numbers

4. Year (Eg 1803)

5. Letter + number

[Webwork]

Each category might be the right choice depending on the purpose or theme of your website.

[Lobo]

The only one that is important is the memorable one ...

[physics]

I like keyword related (cars.com, webmasterworld.com) or memorable (google, yahoo).

[larryhatch]

I also like KW related, and fairly short, but those have gotten scarce.

How about something like 'AZCARS.com' for a car site in Arizona, but in lower case ..
'123travel' for a travel site .. play with different numbers ..
'widgets888' for a widget site (888 means lucky in some cultures)
'888widgets' if the first one is taken ..

I avoid dashes and other characters that might confuse man or machine.
Some prefer them as they separate KWs in the URL. -Larry

[etechsupport]

I think the domain with keyword is more significant, however it should be little descriptive of your products or services and easy to remember.

[Rosalind]

I don't like numbers. I think names like widgets4people or 123widgets are pretty tacky. And most of the best numbers are already gone, because long numbers are tough to remember.

Keywords are good for optimisation, but boring. Something brandable and unusual is great so long as you intend to promote the site in other ways apart from through the search engines. If you can think of something funny or whimsical, you're probably on to a winner.

[kittychuk]

Many domain name is related to keywords.

But many portal site are no keywords.

Example :
Yahoo
Google
Baidu(China Search engine)
Skype
Excite
Overture
Lycos

How can they create the brand in first day? Maybe the content is great.

[Leosghost]

never ask a webmaster which sounds best ..ask joe or jane public which amongst your possible names are the best ..
they are likely to be your visitors ..their reasons for coming are not the same as yours and their connotations around word sounds and word images are not the same as yours either ..

the one possible exception to this is to try to go for the product or service slightly misspelt ..just enough to stick in their minds ..toys'r'us is an example of this .

of course if you can get a.us domain ..the sky is your oyster!
domainsr.us etc ..etc..etc ..

the suffixes can alway be used ..think out of the box ..

de.li.cio.us or however its now being spelt also comes to mind..

don't forget to also register the misspells yourself ..what are they ..ask a group of 9 year olds to write the domain name down ..that'l get you most misspells ..

there is also keyboard keys "too close" miss types ..etc