[How To] Choosing a Good Domain Name

wxdqz

New Member
This thread will teach people how to make good decisions on choosing domain names and making sites that are perfect for your site. These are just some simple techniques that I thought I should share on this forum.

1) Using Common Domain Endings

This can be good or bad for you. By common domain endings (CDE) i mean using domain endings such as xyzpal.com or xyztube.com or something like that where xyz is a word or a few words related to your niche.

Here are some examples:

xyztube.com
xyzpal.com
xyzdaddy.com
xyzwire.com
xyzbay.com
xyzspace.com

and many more....

Here's whats bad about this:

* People will remember the original site. For example, lets say your making a video streaming site, and you choose to name it xyztube.com, then people will remember youtube, and simply go to youtube instead. The person that made dailymotion.com was smart, that is a good domain name and it has no relevance to youtube, because you dont want to remind your traffic who your competition is. By choosing a name that ends with "tube", you are indeed advertising YouTube.
* People will also think that your site is a clone site that is nothing more than a "wanna-be." That is a bad thing for your site's reputation.
* If your site happens to be better than the competition, then in this case with the YouTube example, your site will be sued. Thats the worst. So dont choose a domain that is so much of a copy cat.


Here's what's good about this:

* If your copying isnt that bad, then you just might make the cut and become famous easily, because it makes it easy for people to remember the domain name. For example, say there are two New York phone numbers, 478 2999 and 565 2336, and your New York phone number is 678 2959, then you will be able to remember the other 478 phone number very easily.
* Lets take LimeWire, a VERY famous site and application. If you copy that, then you can make a porn site like spankwire.com, and there you have it, two famous and really easy to remember site names. Spankwire copied the whole "wire" DNE and still were able to stay famous.



2) Keywords in The Domain

People think that having keywords in your domain name is the best thing, but it can be bad at times. The website how2createawebsite.com chose keywords well, and it became famous for noobs and newbies very quickly (in part due to the affiliate that the site has).

* The Good:
* Keywords will make it really easy to have a good PR and come up high in the list of the first page of search engines. That could never be bad in any way. Sites like proxydirectory.com show up quick for those keywords and proxytoplist.com as well.
* Keywords also help people remember the sites name at times. If your looking for a proxytoplist, then guess what, you go to proxytoplist.com, duh.

* The Bad:
* Keywords often end up making a site's domain name really long. Eight is a good number of characters to have in your domain, at max. However, as we see with proxytoplist.com and proxydirectory.com, the domain names exceed 8 characters. Because of this, people will choose other sites that have the same niche but different and smaller domain names, like in this case, I would go with pooxe.com, for example.
* Keywords also seem to make site's dull. For example, when you want to search for something regardless of where you usually search, you definitly dont go to search.com do you? Or in other examples, if your searching for a proxy to use, you dont just go to proxy.com, as its probably filtered on the PC anyways.
* One really bad failed attempt at picking a domain with keywords are usually ones that go with xxx-yyy-zzz.com with xxx, yyy, and zzz being three different keywords with -'s in between. These kinds of sites show up quick in search engines, but again, no one is going too type that shit in, people will choose a site with a smaller name in the same niche.


3) Domain Name Type (gTLD, ccTLD, etc)

Chances are, you dont know what a gTLD or ccTLD is. TLD stands for top level domain. The gTLD is a generic top level domain, which are domain names ending with a .info, .org, .net, etc. A ccTLD is a country code top level domain, which are domain names ending with a .in (India), .us (USA), .it (ITALY), etc.

Choosing a gTLD is best, but one can never say when it is best. This is a very complicated part of choosing a domain name, so bare with me.

* Dot info-- This is best if your website will be all about information. If your making a website that gives information on making a website, then you may go with creatingwebsites.info, which completely makes sense. A .info domain name is often associated with proxy sites as well. In my case, I have 5, four letter, .info proxy sites.
* Dot com-- People often think that theres no way of going wrong with a .com domain name, but you know what? There is. Often people choose .com domain names that are really lengthy because thats all that's available with .com, long domain names. Dont choose a domain name with more than 8 letters unless it really works well. In the case of webcosmoforums.com, this works well, and there is nothing wrong.
* Dot net-- This is often wheat people go with if the domain name they want is not available with .com's. You have to be careful. Remember, you dont want a domain name that will remind people of other more famous websites, especially if you share the same niche. So lets say youtube.net was available, and you wanted to make a site like YouTube, then you would be making a huge mistake, because why would someone go to youtube.net when they can just go to youtube.com ?
* Dot org-- This can be good for many things, just first of all, dont make the mistake mentioned for .net . This is best for sites that are organizations. For example, warez-bb.org is a great organization for warez supporters, and it gives the site a feeling of "official-ness" if you know what I mean.
* DOT [ccTLD]-- Choosing some kind of country code does not mean a lot. It is best to be used for a domain hack. An example of a domain hack would be del.icio.us or wis.dm which both use the TLD at the end to make a word. This also allows people to have small and easy to remember domain names, but it is often expensive.


4) Where to Register Domain

In my opinion, its usually best to register your domains with one registrar, just to keep things safe and simple. In that case, you should choose a registrar who has multiple types of TLD's, so that you can register almost any domain you need with that person. In addition, money matters, so pick a registrar that is cheap and always remember to Google for coupons that you can use to get discounts on your domain purchase.

* Most people go with GoDaddy, as it is super famous because of the GoDaddy Girls and Bob Parson. Although GoDaddy is great, its not the best. They dont offer tons of TLD's, and they have many ways of making easy money off of you when you register a domain, so make sure when you register a domain with GoDaddy, dont buy the extra shit. Make an account with GoDaddy though, because if you ever buy a website, theres a chance you will need a GoDaddy account.
* Name.com is one of my personal favorites, because they have tons of TLD's and the support is great as well. It also has a simple way to search for multiple domains to ease the pain of finding a good domain name.
* EuroDNS is good, too. They have multiple TLD's, and there site structure is really good as well.
* One good way to go is to see if the site your getting your hosting from lets you buy a domain name from them. These domain names are often free and for life, so this is a great buy if your planning on sticking with the hosting for a while. HostGator has this service, as well as many other sites do.
* Others are:
register.com
active-domain.com
domaindirect.com
namecheap.com
101domain.com and many more.
 
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