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Thousands of domains are being registered daily to start new websites, blogs or online businesses. Lots of people choose the wrong domain name to make a startup for which they regret later when it’s too late to change the name.

A domain name is not just an URL, it’s a brand name and identity of a person or a business. Therefore choosing the right domain name is the most important part for any online startup.

This article will give you a clear idea about how to choose the best domain name for your website that will make your works easier.

Hope to provide you with the best guideline that can help you a lot to get your first/next domain name for maximum benefit in this journey of the internet world. Best of luck …

Here the guideline starts. Read all the steps carefully and try to apply as much as you can for purchasing your next domain.

1. Domain Extension (.com, .co, .info)

This is the most important part of the domain from my point of view as it has a high impact on any domain name except some special cases.

COM is the best and most popular domain extension in the world for which I usually go for the COM TLD.

Suppose, you have a blog and shared only the name (without domain extension) of your blog with your friends. They will definitely write your blog’s name and will add COM to visit your blog. This is the most common case as COM is the most common and widely used domain extension.

However, COM TLD may not bring sweet fruits in every case. If your business, blog etc. is specific the go for that specific domain extension. For example, ORG is best for organizations, .NET is best for network-based sites,  ME (which actually is the TLD of Montenegro country) is best for a personal site.

Besides, if you are targeting any specific country then go for country domain extension such as the US for the USA,  AU for Australia, IT for Italy, etc.

With all the new extension explosion in the latest years is it possible to also choose from popular towns like .London, .Paris etc.

Further reading on a domain extension:

• List of Internet top-level domains
• What are the five most common domain extensions and which one should I use?

2. Domain Length

This is another important fact about the domain. The fewer letters your domain contain the higher its value is. Domain names with fewer characters are highly demandable as it’s easy to remember and spreads fast like a burning fire.

It’s better to keep domain length within 10-12 characters. Look at all top domains, almost all of them contain less than 10 characters such as Google.com, Facebook.com, Yahoo.com, Youtube.com, Twitter.com and so on.

Interesting fact: There are only 3 single lettered domain names which are fortunately registered before the new law. One of them (Z.com) was sold for $6.8 million in 2014 and took place in the top ten domain name sales in history. The main reason for this high price is it’s a very short name.

Further reading:

How Long is Too Long for a Domain? (with detailed statistics)

3. Brandable domain names

If you don’t want to rely on search engine or referral traffic and want to get popular by your own brand name then choose your domain name very wisely. A brand-able domain name should be small as well as easy to remember.

Further reading on brandable domain names:

• Building A Brand: How To Tell A Powerful Brand Story
• How to name your startup
• How To Position Your Lifestyle And Fashion Brand [Guide & Checklist]
• Why you should consider an aged domain for your digital brand

4. Relevant to a business topic

It’s good to keep your domain name relevant to your website’s topic. It will be an insane job to register a domain name tastyfish.com and use it for a cloth store. So don’t make your visitors think that you are a mad person. Be relevant and be logical.

Further reading:

• How Important is a Domain Name for the Business?

5. Numbers and hyphens in the domain name

When we see our desired domain name is already registered we usually add numbers or a hyphen rather than searching for a new name and get the domain registered. Use of numbers in the domain name is fine to a particular level but it should be in an organized way.

For example, 99homes.com or taxi247.com is Ok but 829homes.com or taxi333.com is not fine.

Now come to hyphens, I extremely recommend not to use a hyphen in the domain name. It makes the domain name more complicated and hard to remember.

6. Easy pronunciation

It’s better to choose a domain that will keep the teeth safe while making pronunciation. If your domain name cannot be uttered easily people will not bother to remember that name.

For example, kohlambns.com is a bad domain name.

7. Easy to remember

Easy to remember feature is the secret key to successful domains. This feature is most important for branding or selling domain.

Remember small, clean and easy to utter domains are easy to remember. Besides, you need to be careful about character recurrence in a domain such as besttattoo.com. In this case, some people may forget how many “t”s are there or they might get confused.

Further reading:

• How to Find a Domain Name with Fun, Memorable Domain Phrases

8. Main Keyword in the Domain name

Although it’s not necessary it’s good to keep your main keyword in the domain name. This trick was helpful for SEO but now it not as effective as before. However, still, it’s a search engine ranking factor for Google as well as other search engines.

Therefore, if you can then try to keep your main keyword in the domain name but don’t be too much aggressive. For example: In the case of starting a women health-related blog healthywomen.com is better than womenland.com and womenland.com is better than besthealthtipsforwomen.com.

Further reading on domain names and SEO:

• Domain Names — SEO Best Practices [2020]
• How to choose an SEO-friendly domain name
• How to Choose a Domain Name That Will Stand the Test of Time

Where to find domain names?

There are several places where you can search for domain names:

• You can register a brand new domain using a domain registrar like Namecheap. Use their search system to find available domain names
• Check domain auctions (Flippa, GoDaddy auctions, NameCheap, DynaDot etc) to purchase an aged domain.
• Use a domain broker like Mediadigi to buy an already established domain from their portfolio.

How to Choose the Best Domain Name [Checklist]

1. Have you chosen a domain extension that matches your website purpose and visitors locations?
2. Is your domain name length no more than 12 characters?
3. Is your domain name easy brandable?
4. Is your domain relevant to your business?
5. Does your domain contain numbers and hyphens?
6. Is your domain easy to pronounce? Ask your friends and colleagues.
7. Is your domain easy to remember? Ask your friends and associates.
8. Does your domain contain the main business keyword? Would be awesome.

Conclusion

Great! So you are done with the guideline of choosing the best domain name for your website. Now get the answer of this below question.

Where to get your domain name registered?

I am going to share that service that I use to buy my domain names. It’s NameCheap; one of the leading domain name registrar company. I use this because it provides all kind of privileges like selling a domain, domain auction, parking domain etc. along with buying a domain name.

Very few domain registrar (i.e Godaddy) companies provide such advantages but the cost is very high. Moreover, NameCheap provides free whois privacy for the first year.

Another service that we recently started to use is Porkbun.com. Their prices are unbeatable.