What makes a good domain name?

[Macbeth]

This is a bit of a marketing topic but quite an important one as this weekend I have found all the domain names i have wanted to buy have been bought which is fair enough.

What I find challenging (to put it mildly) is that these good names have been bought by cyber-squatters with no intention of putting a site up.

So the challenge is obviously to be a little clever and come up with a great alternative, but what goes into making a great domain name?

Should I worry about using two words in the domain name? if not why not and can you give any good famous examples?

[incrediBILL]

I suspect that depends on your purpose for the domain name.

If you're building a site looking for organic traffic to feed PPC and affiliate programs, I'm from the old keyword in the name school of thought.

If you're building a long term online business that would probably get repeat customers/visitors, then something catchy, easy to spell and easy to remember would be in order.

[Macbeth]

Thanks for the response, I have a plan for an affiliate site, so what i would like to do is get round it by doing a domain name that:

Captures the imagination
Includes a word that people readily identify with

But to get round the keyword thing:

Have a subdomain

[pete_m]

Another aspect is the "telephone test" - if you need people to remember the domain name then make sure that it's easy to say or spell on the phone.

Example: either avoid names like "widgets4u", or purchase the alternatives like "widgetsforyou" and (optionally) the hyphenated versions like "widgets-for-you".

[Rosalind]

There are a number of letters and numbers that don't appear on car registrations because it's easy to confuse them. So you can have 0 (zero), but not o, for example. I wonder whether this might be a consideration for domain names too?

[SashaCorinne]

A good domain name would be one that is marketable and easy to remember. When deciding what category your site will be developed in, it's important to think about how strong the domain name would be for that particular industry. Does the domain name have development value and possible brand recognition? Do you think that the domain name would be popular with search engines in comparison to other domain names in that field? It's really important to understand that nomatter how great or poor a domain name is, the marketing of it or lack there of is what will make or break you.

Sasha Hirshfield

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[edited by: tedster at 6:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 8, 2005]

[happyregistrar]

Domain Selection and other points of design all blend to gether to form a complicated soup-

their are several tools out there to help -

[edited by: engine at 3:06 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2005]
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