Selecting a Domain Name
Sounds simple enough and actually it is. There are a few things to watch for though.
First of all, hopefully you haven't registered your company name yet. If you have, you may have a hard time getting your company name and your domain name to match. The competition for domain names is fierce and usually it is easier to get your domain name first then create your actual company name around it.
If you have a national company and your domain name is taken, you may have some legal recourse to get the ownership of that name, if your name is recognized nationally. If you are not so fortunate, you get to join the free for all scramble for good domain names.
An important thing to keep in mind when selecting a domain name is just how search engines work. If your domain name contains a word, or words that will exist on your website multiple times, it can significantly enhance your search engine rankings. For example if you are an internet company, and your domain name has internet in it, you will be better off in the search engine rankings as internet is likely to show up in your website many times. For example www.internetnextstep.com allows us to pursue better search engine rankings as the word internet is in our domain name.
You probably don't want to register just one name.
Registering domain names is like hunting for a storefront. The advantage of domain names is you can have multiple store fronts. I won't go in to detail just yet, but the sections on mirror pages, gateway pages, search engine placement, will give more detail on why more domain names are a good thing.
What I will cover here is the fact that a dot com (.com) is the BEST choice. Unless you want most of your customers going to the wrong place, search and search and search until you come up with a domain name that is a .com name. .net, .org, .ws, .tv, .ca, .ne.jp, .co.jp, .info and all those others are not prime real-estate, they are back streets. If you can, you should register the .com, .net, and .org versions of your domain and point them all at your site. It is also a good idea to check out any misspellings of your name or chosen domain and register them too. Try entering in various spellings of Hewlett Packard, and you will be amazed to see that almost all of them take you to HP's site, including www.hp.com. This is good sense. Main point here is that the .com is still the most effective domain name.
You can select your domain name/names by picking a company where
you want to register
that domain name and using their lookup feature. Go to the next page for
our top 3 picks for domain name registering. The box you are looking for
should look something like this:
