Criteria for Selecting a Domain

1. Selecting a Domain
Be Prepared to Spend Time Researching Alternatives

2. Why is My Choice of Domain Name
Important?
• You have a purpose in creating a website, your domain needs
to convey that purpose.
• You want your domain to be unique to distinguish from other
websites with a similar message or product.
• You want folks to be able to find your website.
• You want folks to be able to remember your website.
• You want folks to take you seriously.
• When folks find your website, you want them to spend as much
time as possible reading your content.

3. Use Creative Thinking or Mind
Mapping
• Think of several terms or phrases related to the theme your
website or blog.
• Put them together in various combinations with prefixes and
suffixes to create a list of candidate domain names.

4. Make Your Domain Unique
• You want to stand out from the crowd.
• Don’t chose domain names that are similar to other domain
names by adding hyphens or pluralizing an existing domain.
• Folks get really angry when they show up at your website when
they were intending to go to some other popular website. This
does you no good and can do lots of harm to your reputation.

5. Choose Only Dot-Com Domains
• Dot-Com is the gold standard. It’s the norm.
• Most folks automatically assume Dot-Com when trying to find a
website.

6. Make It Easy To Type
• Don’t get tricky with spelling.
• Use easy-to-type letters. Try typing in the domain yourself
before choosing it.

7. Make It Easy To Remember
• It does you no good to have a great website if no one can
remember the name so they can’t share it with their friends.

8. Keep The Name as Short as Possible
• Short names are easy to type and easy to remember.
• Try to keep it under 15 characters.
• Short name fits better on business cards.

9. Don’t Deceive
• Make your domain match the theme of your website.
• Make your domain intuitive.

10. Don’t Infringe on Copyrights
• There is no up-side to copyright infringement.
• Most folks are fair-minded and won’t do business with someone
who is clearly encroaching.

11. Don’t Use Hyphens and Numbers
• Use of Hyphens and numbers makes the domain hard to
remember and hard to type and hard to convey verbally.

12. Don’t Get Cutsey
• You want folks to take you seriously.
• Folks might not get your sense of humor.
• What you think is funny might be offputting.

13. Avoid Use of Names Related to a
Specific Geographic Region
• You might move.
• You might want to sell your business to someone in a different
geographic region.
• The geographic area might get a bad reputation.

14. I’ve Found the Perfect Domain But
It’s Already Taken
• One of the most daunting aspects of searching for the “perfect”
domain is that most of the good domain names are already
taken.
• You may need to evaluate numerous possibilities before you
find a domain name that you like that has not been registered.