Choose a Smart Domain Name

The Search

Now you have your niche you need to start looking for domain names that will compliment your product, service, offering or idea. Look at what your competitors are doing and learn from their successes and failures. Think smartly if you are selling something you might want to add words into your domain like for sale, sales, buy. Logic says that people who would search for boatsforsale.co.uk or buyboatsnow.co.uk would be more targeted if you have a boat selling business, than boats.co.uk or boating.co.uk, mind you I wouldn’t mind owning either of them.

Extra Reading: “12 rules for choosing the right domain name” over at SEOMOZ

Hypenated Domains - I own a few successful hypenated domains, but offer this advice; be patient.

If the domain you want is available without the hypens, buy it first. Hypenated domains in the past have been seen as more spammy by search engines, but if you add enough value/content you should have no problems. The other reason I prefer non hypenated domains is type in traffic (when a user directly types in your domain into a browser). If I was lucky enough to own villas.co.uk I would likely see a huge volume of type in traffic, which costs me nothing to produce. It is unlikely someone will type in a two word phrase with a hypen in between, so you may miss out on some traffic.

Extra Reading: over at AFF4U on hypenated domains.

Buying your Domain

Prices of domain names change from registrar to registrar and many domainers will have their favourites. I personally use moniker.com, as a friend recommended them to me a while back and have only one complaint with them….sometimes I can be searching for a .co.uk domain name and the system just crashes, so I revert to good old sedo.co.uk.

Example

In our previous post, choosing a niche domain name I decided on a niche, mountain bike tyres. I would then go to my registrar and look for different domains like: mountainbiketyres mountainbike-tyres mbtyres biketyres biketyresforsale etc…. .com or .co.uk depending on your strategy.

Tools

Moniker - My registrar of choice
Sedo
Godaddy
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