Domain Name

Ideas for Selecting a Domain Name in Today's Competitive Marketplace

Your site's URL or "domain name" is a very important piece of your overall online marketing strategy. You may want it to be your company's name or you may choose to have your domain name reflect what your business does. But with nearly 100 million domain names registered around the world, including almost 50 million dot-coms, how do you find a good one?

Domain name "extensions" include .com, .net, .org, .edu, .biz, .info and country-code extensions such as us, .la, .tv, or .nu. These extensions were originally created to categorize sites as much as possible. For example businesses typically use ".com", organizations or groups favor ".org", and colleges and universities end in "edu". There are hundreds of extensions around the world, but these are the most common. If you want to be identified with a specific country, especially if you have multiple sites, you may also add an extension indicating that. For instance ".uk" is the United Kingdom, .ca is for Canada, .au is Australia. One of the newest top-level-domains gaining popularity is .la, which was originally assigned to Laos in Southeast Asia but is now being actively marketing in Los Angels and Latin America.

One of the most difficult problems when it comes to choosing domain name is availability. The business of marketing credit cards online is a good example. There are thousands of websites devoted to marketing credit cards, including CreditCards.com, eCreditCards.com and CreditCardJungle.com. So, if you want to go into the business of marketing credit cards online for yourself, you'd have to come up with a creative name for yourself. If you're willing to choose q name that's not .com, such as .net, .org, .biz, .ws or a country code like .cc or .la, you'll have more choices. Alternatively, you can go to a domain-name broker such as Sedo, BuyDomains.com or AfterNic which sell domain names for a premium.

Choosing the right domain name for your site can be a fun, yet challenging process. Enjoy your search!