Choosing the right domain name
Picking the right domain name can be an easy task depending on what your business or personal goals are. If you're considering a domain name for a personal home page or blog then a domain name can be less significant than if your business name, product or service depends on it. In this instance, we will discuss domain names with the intent to develop for online commerce.
Lets take an example of a business and go through the steps in getting a good domain name. This business will sell bicycles, all types of bicycles but more specifically mountain bikes and bmx bikes.
If your company name is long, hard to remember and not likely to catch internet users from certain online advertising campaigns then consider a generic domain name. The first step is to identify some terms that are associated with the products you sell. Go to the Yahoo Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool http://inventory.overture.com and be as broad as possible to view terms associated with your product. In this case, I typed in Bikes to find the most searched terms containing the term Bikes. The top results include dirt bike with 134,167 searches for February, mountain bike with 53,000, bmx bike with 20,000, bike shop with 17,000 and several dozen other terms that may or not be associated with the products we're selling.
So now we have a few terms to work with we brain storm for some domain name options. Of course we would like to be able to register domain names like bikes.com, bicycles.com, mountainbikes.com or bmx.com but those domain names have been registered for some time now and unless you have a large bank role it is doubtful you will be able to buy these domain names from their owners. So the step in brainstorming for a domain name involve looking for keywords that describe what it is we're selling. We know we are a bike shop or store, we sell all bikes, we sell bikes at discounted rates, and we sell nationwide.
So just from the two seconds of brainstorming I can think of a few domain names that would be good choices.
bikeshop.com
bikestore.com
allbikes.com
discountbikes.com
cheapbikes.com
affordablebikes.com
USAbikes.com
bikeamerica.com
We now go to our trusty domain name registrar and check the availability of these domain names. Godaddy has a bulk registration option and is a good way to find the availability of domain names. Running the bulk registration check we find that none of these domain names are available. The next step is to find more keywords associated with the keywords describing our business. Go to Thesaurus.com and find keywords associated with the terms:
shop
store
all
discount
Searching shop brings up keywords such as business, boutique, chain, outlet, and factory. Store brings up similar results and several additional terms such as supply, storeroom, and mart. All shows terms such as total and every. Discount, cheap and affordable are very similar so I searched thesaurus for cheap and found the keywords budget, bargain, and low priced. So now we check the following domain names at the registrar.
bikeboutique.com
bikechain.com
bikeoutlet.com
outletbikes.com <--- switch the terms if it makes sense.
bikefactory.com
factorybikes.com
bikesupply.com
bikestoreroom.com
bikemart.com
budgetbike.com
budgetbikes.com <--- be sure to check plural in certain instances.
bargainbike.com
bargainbikes.com
lowpricedbike.com
lowpricedbikes.com
After running the search we find the following domain names available.
outletbikes.com
bikestoreroom.com
lowpricedbike.com
lowpricedbikes.com
Likely, once this article is read these domains will be reserved but at the time I wrote this the above domain names are available. Not sure which one to use, registrar all of them. At less than $9/year per registration your looking at a small $50/year investment. This is a very quick and easy process to finding a great domain name.