Summarizing

If all this seems pretty confusing, it may be wise to engage the services of a consultant. It will cost you anything from US$25 upwards for the service, but the fee of a good consultant is money well spent. Your domain name is a very important part of your online business, and there are many traps set for the unwary.

In summary, here are the basic guidelines for choosing a good domain name:

» As short as possible
» As generic as possible, but related (resale value, trademarks etc.)
» No numbers or misspellings
» First letter as close to "a" as possible
» Easy to remember (would you remember it accurately if you heard it on the radio)
» Easy to spell (especially for international clients)
» .com is universally recognized and remembered - the "Beverly Hills" of extensions. 
    The new extensions such as .biz etc will take a few years to be accepted.
» No doubling up of letters - e.g. development tools. 

One final point on hyphens. Some search engines rank sites more highly if your domain name contains keywords - e.g white-flombles.com. By removing the hyphen, you lose the benefit. It's a case of weighing up whether it would be more beneficial to you to have a name with easy recall (hyphens complicate things) or the search engine rankings value.


© Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net 
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