Tips for choosing an effective and suitable domain name for your business. When it comes to choosing a domain name there are a number of factors to take into consideration. If you are going to be investing time and money in developing an online presence around your domain name then you want to make sure that you get it right first time around. Here are a few pointers to help you choose an effective name.

First though, a warning; be prepared for many of your ideal choices to have already been registered. We would all have liked a premium generic name like business.com but that is why its price tag when sold on was $7.5m. If you are a small company save your pennies on your first registration and choose one that is still available

Decide whether you want a domain name that identifies your company / brand or a generic description of your goods and services. We think a domain such as thebestwebhostingproviderintheworld is far less memorable and effective than yourcompanyname. Keep them relatively short to minimise the risk of typos. Don't be afraid to use abbreviations or acronyms although four or five letters should be about the maximum to expect people to accurately remember. If you already have a successful company and brand in the 'real world' why make it harder to see. Of course if your company is say 'A Jones Trading Ltd' and you sell nothing but 'thingummies' and you find thingummies.com is available then it would be an eminently suitable name to register. If your product portfolio is far wider though such a name would be useful only to point to a standalone minisite for your 'thingummy' sales when your main website could well be ajonestrading.com. Most single word .coms and .nets are already taken so don't be too downhearted when you realise that televisions.com, computers.com etc etc have already gone. Assuming you are still 'A Jones Trading' but now sell all manner of electrical items ajelectricals.com would be far preferable to bestworldwideelectricals.com, televisionsandcomputersworldwide.com or another lengthy purely generic name. An example such as ajelectricals.com combines a name abbreviation and generic description of goods in an easy to remember domain name. Generic keyword stuffing in your domain names looks amateurish, is difficult to remember and would be easy to confuse with names such as bestelectricalsworldwide.com or computersandtelevisionsworldwide.com which could well take them to one of your competitors

Do NOT try and establish a presence using a name that is already heavily promoted as a brand. Including other companies' names or trademarked brands in your domain name when you have no legitimate claim to do so is just foolish. WIPO regularly reassigns names that are deemed to be passing off, infringing trademarks or cybersquatting. All your hard work would disappear down the drain. Just because lots of registrations have been made with the letters 'ebay' in the title doesn't make it right or advantageous to you. In the event that you started to generate substantial traffic at say anotherebay.com the auction giant's lawyers would soon be dropping you a line. We often see these trademarkedbrand-secrets, -info, -sellers or -anythingelse.com variant names on the resale market but regard them as worthless. Legitimacy of names depends on many factors including perceived intention, established use, trading name, protected trademarks, nature of goods / services, colour scheme and layout and country of operation.

Avoid overly hyphenated names. There are far too many find-kansas-usa-and-worldwide-holidays.com type 'replikit' sites out there. Don't make yours look like one of them. kansasholidays.com would look far better. If your site also includes information about holidays further afield then the search engines will pick up on that fact. If it doesn't, a long false keyword littered name will look stupid and may well be penalised eventually by the search engines

Stick to a popular and well known extension. If you trade worldwide then a .com will probably suit you best. If you are involved in technology provisioning you may want to consider a .net instead. If your company is based in the UK the .co.uk will identify your geographic locality as would .de for Germany, .nl for the Netherlands and so on. You should avoid .org for a company site. If the .com, .net and country specific extension have gone it would be better to choose a different name, unless of course you are actually registering on behalf of an organisation. Overall if you find that the .com, .net and home country specific versions are all available for your chosen name then we would suggest registration of all three considering the nominal yearly cost. There are many two letter country codes such as .tm (Turkemenistan), .tv (Tuvalu), .ws (Western Samoa) and the likes that are marketed as 'alternative' global extensions to suggest trademark, television and website respectively. We do not recommend these for your main domain name. Their viability and memorability have yet to be proven. We have even seen subdomains offered at the biz and pro.gr names purporting to suggest Business / Professional Global Range. This is utter nonsense; anyone with any internet experience knows that .gr denotes Greece. If you have no presence or trade in Greece a .gr name need not even be considered.

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