Think about your products or services:

Ideally, your domain name should reflect your products or services. For example, if your business will be selling running shoes, you want your domain name to reflect that. Something like ‘bestrunningshoes.com’ or ‘running-shoes.com.’ Either one of those would work well, especially because they would help with search engine ranking. If the domain name and the website are both relevant to the search phrase that someone types in, you will achieve a higher ranking. Also, there are some cases when people just type what they want into the browser. You want to be that one that pops up.

Make it easy to remember:

When you make your domain name easy to remember, it will be much easier for potential customers to find you again. If you make your domain name a difficult or a long one to remember, it might be harder to find you and get back to your page. For example, remembering a domain name like ‘bestrunningshoes.com’ would likely be pretty simple. The name is fairly short, reflects the product being sold, and there are no special characters. However, one like ‘best-running-shoes.com’ might be harder to remember because of the use of special characters. It’s simple things like this that will make your domain name a success.

You may want to name your company and domain name something catchy, original, and different. Although this tactic can be highly successful, make sure that both have some relation to your products, and expect to do some marketing to make sure potential customers don’t misspell your domain name and end up somewhere else. For instance, if you wanted to name your company ’shooz.com’, you wouldn’t want to be confused with ’shoes.com’, so you would need to get the proper spelling into the minds of your visitors and customers through marketing.

Make your domain name the same as your company name:

This might sound pretty obvious, but a lot of companies’ names and domain names don’t match. If someone searches for you, goes to your page and then leaves it, you want them to get back to you easily. If your company name is ‘Best Running Shoes’ but your domain name is ‘tennisshoesforyou.com,’ they’ll likely become confused and will not be able to find you easily. Also, when customers tell their friends, "I just got a great pair of shoes from bestrunningshoes.com…", their friend’s won’t end up at your site, but at some other running shoe site. The same thing goes for the use of special characters. Think about this: someone tells a friend, "I just love Track Suits for You dot com." If your domain name is ‘track-suits-for-you.com’ (with dashes in between each word), the friend may later go online and type in ‘tracksuitsforyou.com’ instead. These are things you have to think about.

If the name you want is unavailable:

If the domain name you want is unavailable, improvise in a way that still allows your name to be catchy and not difficult to remember. If you can’t obtain ‘bestrunningshoes.com,’ then try other simple things like, ‘greatrunningshoes.com’ or ‘myrunningshoes.com.’ You may also try a different approach through more original names or clever misspellings (see the previous tip on making your domain name easy to remember for advice on this). This way the name will still be easy to remember, get your point across, and be successful.

Selecting a domain name can be difficult, but when you follow the advice above, and really try to make the name as simple yet meaningful as you possibly can, it will work out great.