Things You'll Need:
- creativity
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Step 1
KNOW THE BASICS OF A DOMAIN. As an example, ehow.com is a domain name which brings you to the eHow website. The extension .com is the top-level-domain (TLD). You may also see URLs such as www.ehow.com or articles.ehow.com or even www.articles.ehow.com. The rule of thumb is the text immediately before and including the TLD (in this case .com) until you hit the next "." is the domain name, so in all these cases, the domain is still just ehow.com. The part before the domain name is considered a subdomain.
It's important to understand that, because if someone offers you hosting and gives you YourName.TheirDomain.com, you don't own anything. You've simply been given a spot on their domain, which they control and can delete at any time. For savings of less than $10/year, you don't even want to consider piggybacking on someone else's domain. -
Step 2
BUY A .COM DOMAIN. Think of this as a neighborhood. The value of a house in a prestigious neighborhood will be much higher than that of the slums. .Com is Beverly Hills, .net is still a decent neighborhood, but most others will have little value.
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Step 3
KEEP IT SHORT. Long names are more difficult to remember or even read. If you bought a billboard ad, would someone driving by a 70mph, while keeping their eyes on the road, be able to read, understand and remember it? Likewise, the fewer words, the better. The ideal domain would be a single word, but good luck finding one of those now.
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Step 4
MAKE IT DESCRIPTIVE AND/OR TRADEMARK-ABLE. If someone looked only at your domain name, you want them to understand what your site is about. This can be done by common language or by extensive advertising of a trademarked name. For instance, ks83k3f.com is meaningless and hard to remember. However, ComputerRepair.com is very obvious AND easy to remember. Likewise, amazon.com is trademarked and is now pretty much public knowledge.
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Step 5
AVOID USING DASHES AND/OR NUMBERS IN THE DOMAIN. The rule of thumb here is you want your domain to be easily transferred verbally. Amazon.com is hard to mess up, as is ehow.com. However, if you need to take the extra effort to explain that the domain something-****.com contains a dash and the four is numerical and the "you" is actually a "u", it gets too confusing and hard to remember.
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Step 6
AVOID RESTRICTED TERMS. Several search engines, including Google, restrict some words, usually pertaining to adult content. Some of these words are innocent enough, but they've somehow become associated with bad websites. If your domain contains a restricted word, your domain will be filtered out of the search results for anyone enabling filtering on Google. You will also not be allowed to use Google Apps on your site.
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Step 7
CHECK TO SEE IF THE DOMAIN WAS PREVIOUSLY OWNED. Sometimes this can be a positive thing, but sometimes it'll hurt you. It depends on how the domain was previously used. You most definitely don't want to use a domain that got itself on every blacklist because it was used for spamming or explicit content. Again, google the domain and see if any old references pop up. You might luck out and find quality links from respected sites, which will help your cause. But, if all links are from questionable sites, it's best to start fresh.
Also, check the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) and see if there's anything in the archive that you can check out.
