The Thrill of the Hunt: Choosing a Domain Name

This is the third in a series of articles designed to help you build a niche blog you love. In the first, we talked about finding a niche. Then we talked about doing keyword research and how to use keywords to ensure surfers can find your site. Today we’re going to talk about chosing a domain name.

Your home or business has a street address so visitors can easily find you. Your home online is no different. It needs a unique identifier that tells people exactly where you’re located. Rather than a house number and street name, though, your website has a domain name. And also unlike your house number and street, you get to choose your own, and that’s what we’re going to do today.

Domain Name Rules

There are a few rules you should follow when choosing a domain name, and some domain name tricks you should avoid. For starters…

• Domains should be short and memorable – preferably no more than three words.
• Domains should be easy to spell – no clever phonetic spellings or numbers for words.
• Domains should always be dot coms. Others will argue that dot net and dot org and even dot info are fine, but I stick with dot com.
• Domains must never contain the name of a company or brand that you don’t own, unless your goal is to receive a cease and desist letter from a lawyer who makes more in an afternoon than you made last year.
• Domains should sound good when spoken aloud.
• Domains should read sensibly even when all scrunched together. See whorepresents.com, for example – which doesn’t sell gifts for the working girl in your life, though it certainly looks that way to me.

Using Keywords in a Domain Name

A lot of people – niche affiliate marketers especially – will tell you that having your primary keyword in your domain name is essential to good rankings. I’m all for including it if you can – but only if you can do so in a natural way. In other words, if organicgardening.com is available, I’d buy it. But I wouldn’t buy organic-gardening.info just to get my keyword in the domain name. I’d choose either a less popular keyword, or I’d go with something brandable instead, like simpletomato.com.

Buying a Domain Name

Domains are purchased through companies called registrars. I use NameCheap.com, but regardless of where you buy your domain, you can expect to pay about $12 per year for a dot com.

To buy a domain, just head over to your favorite registrar and enter your preferred domain into their search box:

Click the search button, and NameCheap will tell you if the domain you’re asking about is available and also give you options for other domain extensions.

Check the names you want, click “Add to Cart,” and you’ll be taken to a checkout screen.

Notice the “Free Whois Guard” I’ve circled on the checkout screen – this is an option you have with any registrar (though most don’t offer it for free) and it simply means that someone looking for the owner of a domain won’t find your personal information. Here is a screenshot of the WhoIs information for this domain, which is public:

You can see it includes my name, address, and phone number, along with my email address. It’s not a big deal to me in this case, since Cindy Bidar isn’t exactly a common name, and anyone who wants to can certainly find me. Although I do use a PO Box rather than my real address. That’s just good common sense.

On another domain I own, however, I’ve chosen to hide the WhoIs information. So if anyone were to go looking for the owner, this is what they’ll find:

Nothing there identifies me as the owner of that domain.

Whether you choose to hide your personal information is up to you. I do it because (a) it’s free – at least for the first year, and (b) I have a lot of sites in a lot of very different niches, and I don’t necessarily want them connected in any way. Nor do I want random strangers to know which niches I operate in. I also use pen names on other sites, so it wouldn’t do for the curious to be able to easily discover that Rick who blogs about his tomato garden is also Sandy who blogs about weight loss (not my real pen names or niches, by the way).

Before You Search, Have Your Credit Card in Hand

One last thing about buying a domain name. Before you go searching your favorite registrar for available domain names, be prepared to buy. If you find your ideal domain and intend to come back tomorrow to buy it, you might just find it no longer available – or it may be available as a “premium domain” with a premium price to match.

I’ve never seen absolute proof that registrars buy domains that are searched but not purchased, but I’ve heard enough anecdotal evidence to believe it’s true. So save yourself the headache – when you find a domain you like, buy it.