12 Rules for Choosing Domain Names

25 Responses to “12 Rules for Choosing Domain Names”

1. Maysa on February 7, 2007 4:22 pm

   Great tips
   Maysa

2. Roberto Alamos Moreno on February 7, 2007 6:18 pm

   Good list but number 12 is a little silly. It doesn’t if the tools use AJAX or not.

   I would suggest to change it to something like this: “use a whois service with good reputation, that doesn’t register domain names that users enter to check if they are registered or not”. Some registrars like godaddy have a reputation of registering domain names that users enter to check if they are registered or not.

   Number 10 is good advice: avoid hyphens in your domain names. But numbers are not that annoying.

3. Sam Jackson on February 7, 2007 7:28 pm

   Numbers do make me tend to distrust a domain a little bit, but it depends on how they’re used. I agonized over my secondary domain–I was really lucky to get myname.org, given my name.

4. Daniel on February 8, 2007 12:25 am

   Roberto, I agree that number 12 could be substituted with “use a reliable whois service”.

   As for numbers, I guess you could find something usable with numbers inside it, but that would be an exception.

5. Garry on February 8, 2007 1:40 am

   Point 10 says reject hyphens. Now this I’m not so sure of. For SEO, having separate words in the url separated with hyphens is surely better than a long string of text that search engines won’t be able to pull keywords out of so easily.

   On the other other hand, for people to remember the domain then not having hyphens obviously helps. If you say to someone “photography basics dot com” you wouldn’t expect them to put the hyphen in between the two words.

   So maybe getting both versions is the answer….

6. Daniel on February 8, 2007 1:43 am

   Garry, your domain name is fine, Darren Rowse is also using something similar (digital-photography-school.com).

   But if I am not wrong your first point is not valid, I think that an hyphen plays no role in helping search engines indentify better keywords.

7. Garry on February 8, 2007 5:39 am

   Yeah didn’t realise Darren was my big ‘competition’ when I started mine

   So is it only those words in a url after the domain that matter to search engines?

   For example, this page’s url is:
   http://www.dailyblogtips.com/12-rules-for-choosing-domain-names/

   so would:
   http://www.dailyblogtips.com/12rulesforchoosingdomainnames/

   be just as good in SEO terms?

8. Dawud Miracle on February 8, 2007 8:08 am

   You might add, Make it easy to spell. I always suggest to my clients that they stay away from words that can be easily misspelt.

9. Jordan Greenaway on February 8, 2007 11:12 am

   Nice article again!

   I’d like to hear some feedback on numbers. I’m starting up a new blog now and I have numbers in my url.

   It never really bothered me, and it’s a lot easier to find a short urls.

   Any other opinions?

10. Daniel on February 8, 2007 1:32 pm

    I guess numbers could be ok if they are easy to remember and if they give a unique sound to your name (i.e. 43 folders).

11. Sridhar on February 8, 2007 7:56 pm

    Don’t dismiss point # 12. Using Ajax domain search sites like http://www.domjax.com makes the domain availability checking process easy and painless.

12. www.ciudadinmobiliaria.com.uy on March 2, 2007 5:16 am

    Se les ha olvidado que el nombre sea simpatico.
    Tambien comprar los dominios regionales no es mala idea (ademas del .com por supuesto).

13. SEO Genius on June 22, 2008 7:13 pm

    I did not even think of my domain name, i just came across the domain name when i bought a bulk of names from ebay a while ago, i believe it fits my site a lot so i am quite lucky.

14. Bryan Hee on July 14, 2008 10:46 pm

    Domain name is represent your business and brand name in your online business. You must select the domain name that easy to spell. You’ll lost a lot of traffic if the visitors miss-spell your domain name.

    To Your Success
    Bryan Hee

15. tc on July 21, 2008 4:25 pm

    I was blocked initially when I wanted to register a domain name and everything seemed to have been taken. Then I had to come up with a list of my own rules which helped me get something I wanted to keep.
    Geography neutral names, domain names that are not time bound, avoiding embarrassing names, etc were a few rules on my list that I didn’t find elsewhere.

16. mad on August 13, 2008 1:19 pm

    La scelta del nome di dominio è importantissima! E’ importante saper scegliere bene.. meno male che in internet c’è chi si ricorda di sottolinearlo..!

17. Ariyes on January 5, 2009 1:56 pm

    Its good to see here about tips for choosing domain names!
    Actually, i am planning to buy a domain to start my business as a internet marketer so i hope that these tips would be usefull for me!

    thank you!

18. jibran ali on March 14, 2009 3:13 pm

    i want to upload my picture by browse so everyone can see me on net

19. Asaya on May 23, 2009 1:19 am

    Wow, this site is great! It was(and still is) a great help on writing my blog. Keep up the good work.