Choosing a Domain Name.

Like any identity, logo, or trademark, your domain name represents part of your overall business brand. It will be associated with your particular product, service or company. Your URl or domain name will be an important part of your marketing campaign and will be used for your web site, email addresses, and possibly an FTP or other server.

You should try and have a domain name that can be easily remembered. People will use your web site or email address to get immediate and convenient access to the information or service that you are providing.

Nowadays it’s more than likely you’ll be choosing a company name based on the domain name availability.

Here are some tips to help you make a better choice for a domain name.

• Know the domain name format. Domain names can generally be up to 67 characters long (including the extension), and contain two or more of the characters a-z, 0-9 and ‘-’ (hyphen).
• Some domain names must be a minimum of 3 characters (not including the extension).
• Domain names cannot start or end with ‘-’ (hyphen).
• Domain names are not case sensitive, therefore DomainName.com and domainname.com and DoMaInNaMe.com are all equivalent. You can now also register multi-lingual domain names.
• Choose  a domain name that is appropriate for your target audience. Depending on your demographic you could choose between being cool, trendy, active, professional, traditional or fun for example.
• Try and keep your domain name short and simple. It will be easier to remember a shorter URL. Your domain name should be one, two or three words at most.
• Short is great, but don’t use difficult to remember acronyms.
• You can have a long domain name containing a list of relevant words for your web site to achieve a higher ranking in some search engines. Several search engines rank web sites higher if the search terms are contained in the URL. You can use up to 63 characters to create a long domain name with keywords and automatically redirect visitors to the real web site. Some registrars offer the redirect service as standard in their price.
• Use appropriate pluralization. For example, newcars.com is probably better than newcar.com if the web site is not relating to “a” particular car. If in doubt you can register both domain names.
• Plan for the future. If you are going to release other products or services from your domain in the future then don’t limit the relevance to the initial product or service. However, internet experts believe that your web site should have only one main subject or focus.
• Register the domain name in the correct global or country level domain. For universal appeal use a .com, .info, .biz, .org, or .net domain. For local appeal use an appropriate domain in your country, such as .co.uk or .org.au. Note that there may be restrictions on what domain names can be registered.
• Check that you are not infringing on an existing trademark or other name that rightfully belongs to another company or individual. An available domain name does not necessarily give you the right to register and use it.
• Don’t choose domain names that are very similar to others if possible. After all, you want customers coming to you, not your competitors! An exception to this rule is if you register the domain name of a commonly misspelt word, in the hope of catching additional customers, provided that you are not infringing on any trademarks.