I’m about to launch a new website, this time one I developed for my own purposes rather than another client. Ultimately I needed to decide what I would use for a domain name. Based on the service being offered, the most logical domain name choices were already taken, so I needed to become a little bit creative.
I could separate the “words” in the domain name with dashes, but I believe that makes word of mouth advertising more difficult. People might forget the dash.
I could get closer to my domain name of choice if I wanted to use a .net or .info extension, but again, that is something someone might make a mistake when speaking about the site, or even when typing the domain name. I still think people too commonly assume everything is .com.
I could use a domain name that is quite a few keywords stuffed in a row, but that normally isn’t such a good idea either. I think it looks cheap and long domain names are difficult to remmber, try to keep them under twenty characters whenever possible.
One of the more important factors to consider would be to think about what someone might use for anchor text while linking to you. When people randomly link to you they might ignore the title of your website and ignore what you feel are important keywords.
Consider the domain name smalldog.com. What do you think most people would use for anchor text linking to them? Probably “Small Dog”. They rank #1 on Google for the term “Small Dog”. But what do they sell? Perhaps you know them already and know the answer to the question, but they sell Apple Computers and computer accessories. While the company name is very clever, anchor text on sites linking to them probably isn’t quite as good as it could be with a different domain. I’m certainly not suggesting they change their company name or domain name, but citing how people will link to a domain.
Choosing a domain name is important for your website. Consider the length of the domain name, how easy it is to pass to others verbally, as well as what anchor text people will likely pick when linking to you.
Tim Flight
Selecting a Good Domain Name
I’ve just finished rebuilding a site for a client who offers translation services, LWT Communications. A graphic designer had created the original site, and there wasn’t much actual text on the site for search engines to gobble up. The designer had basically taken the work and created jpeg files for each of the pages. A picture is only worth 1000 words to human eyes…. it isn’t worth practically anything to a search engine.
Although not a website I designed, I’ve been consulting the 
