Domain name plays a pivotal role in your identity online or in branding your startup. Here are some short, yet important tips you should remember when choosing your next domain name.

Short and sweet

It’s ideal to keep your domain short. Try to limit it to about 10 characters.

Uniqueness

Starting a new blog ? Try giving it a unique name instead of John Doe’s blog. Get creative. Be Unique. Isn’t Flickr way better than myphotoshare.com?

Mnemonic

Your domain name must be one such that a first time visitor will be able to recollect the name when he/she thinks about visiting it for the second time. This must have happened to many of us. You may not be able to recall the name of that great blog you stumbled last night.
The best way to make first time visitors remember your unique domain name is by either associating it with a visual (logo) or a catchy tagline.
E.g: vecteezy.com: It’s highly probable that a first time visitor to this site would forget the name. But the tagline “Stupid Name. Cool Vectors!” makes you stop for a moment and re look the name, finding an association (vector+easy maybe), and thereby making it etched into memory.

Hyphenations

Avoid it as much as possible. does-this-look-cool-2-you.com? Not to me either.

[dot]com

You mean there are other top level domains too? Hell yeah.. There are lots. But its best you stick on to a dot com domain name since most people tend to associate the whole internet with “dot com”s. The casual web surfer has some aversion to anything other than .com (.org,.net are exceptions). So unless you are planning on making a region specific website, a .com would be a better choice.

I’ve got lots of moolah

Well, if you do, you can register your domain name for the most common TLDs like com, net etc. so that no one would try to clone your site. You can even make a small list of the most common typos that people are likely to make when they type your domain name in the addressbar.  Try yaho.com, yahu.com or yahooo.com. They’ll all redirect to yahoo.com

Procrastination: No good

If you’ve got a killer domain name and it’s available, don’t keep its registration for tomorrow. Register it now, for it wont be long before someone else gets a brainstorm and takes the same killer domain name idea. I have sometimes even felt that domain registrars lock the domain you searched for availability, as the same domain name that was shown as “available” on registrar A is shown “already taken” when trying to register it at registrar B. Is it just me or has anyone else experienced it?

Recommended Tools :10xWhois A very fast whois tool. This comes real handy to check if domain names have been taken. I prefer it over domjax because it supports a *lot* more TLDs and domain checks are performed as we type.

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