Domains: How to Choose a Home Run Name

What's in a name? When it comes to a domain it's everything. Today, we're going to look at perhaps the most essential choice you'll make in taking your enterprise to the online realm: Your domain name. The bad news is that there are currently almost 75 million active domain names on the market and some of the most creative have been bought up. The good news is that around 76,000 domains are transferred every 24 hours and the possibilities are endless if you don't mind paying a premium for bought-up names.

1. Brand Recognition
Ideally your domain comes before your corporation. All the best e-commerce sites started with a home-run domain name (think Amazon, Google, EBay, and Yahoo). But for the corporations that already have an established name, it's often best to retain the corporate name as your domain. Later, you can get creative with your sub-domains, or even alternate domain names, but the a priori choice should be your corporate name.
2. Length
Research shows that domains with 2-7 characters are the best best. Anything more than 10 letters begins to lose its strength with visitors.
3. Imagery
The majority of the population thinks more with their visual part of the brain rather than their logical, speech-related part.
4. Keywords
In search engine marketing -- the keyword still reigns supreme in many domain names. This is an unfortunate situation, because nobody wants to name their web site, "easyipphonesetup.com," but they'll often feel obligated to do so, in order to capture search engine traffic. Despite the fact that keyword-specific domains serve search engine traffic well, they often don't resonate with consumers, nor do they look very professional. In this case, i recommend nixing this pitfall. Besides, the good keywords are likely already bought up.

Domain Name image by mlinksva [cc, 2.0]