The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Domain Name

…for your business, personal website or your cat’s online journal.

The domain name is an important aspect of any website. It’s like a person’s name. Once made official, you’re pretty much stuck with it for life (or the website’s life). Changing it in the midst is possible, but comes with a truckload of issues.

That makes it only reasonable that you put in some diligent thought in choosing a good domain name for your website.

This article, I hope, will help you do that.

One point though. There are no hard rules or laws that determine the goodness of a domain name. There is no science behind it. There are only guidelines, or more correctly, opinions. This article has mine. Ultimately it’s what you make it to be.

Things evolve over time. The world of domain names has changed a lot in the past decade and it will in the next one as well. New trends will emerge. Rules will change.

That said, I do believe that these factors have the potential to give an initial edge to your website and to make a positive difference to it’s success.

Sometimes, the importance of a guideline also varies depending upon the type of website you want to create. We’ll look at all these considerations too.

I also discuss some domain search tools at the end that could save you some time (and typing) when searching for that elusive domain of yours.

Enough said. Let’s start.

Should it be a .com?

This is probably the most common question when it comes to choosing domains and so let’s look at this one first.

The .com Factor

Most people still take a website to be synonymous with a ” dot com” even though there are a good number of other domain extensions like .net, .org and so on. This undeniable popularity of “.com” means multiple things:

1. When the domain extension is not mentioned, most people (or devices/browsers) can and do automatically assume it to be a .com
2. Even when a domain extension like .net is mentioned, my granny, my neighbor and some other people will always forget it and end up at the corresponding .com site, at least initially.

The .com extension has gathered a reputation for being something of an all-purpose domain extension, something which none of the other extensions have managed to do so far.

Over the years, new domain extensions like .biz and .info (amongst others) have been added to serve business and information websites respectively, but a .com is still the most preferred extension for even these type of websites. So much so that these extensions never really took off in a big way and suffered from low adoptance.

However, .org is a better fit for non-profit and other organizations and has seen a widespread use. Organizations usually buy the .com version of the domain name (if it is available) and make it redirect to their .org websites.

Takeaway: The .com is the first extension of choice for almost all types of websites.

Country Specific Domains

Some countries have their own versions of the “.com” extension (as well as other extensions). For example, Britain has .co.uk, Australia has .com.au, Singapore has .com.sg and so on. Few countries skip the com from their domain extensions: for example: Germany simply has a .de extension.

Since .com was the first extension on the internet scene, most people still take it as an international (not specific to any country) domain extension. However some people think of it as a US-specific extension. Actually both of them are partially right but that isn’t the question. The question is how does this matter?

Here’s how: Let’s say a guy in the UK searches for “home delivery pizza” and sees a .com and a .co.uk in the first and second positions respectively on Google. If he believes that .com’s are US-specific websites, it is more likely that he will click on the .co.uk website (because that would be relevant in this case unless he had a pizza service in mind that delivers across the Atlantic). On the other hand, if the same person were looking to download an ebook and found a .com website, it would still be a relevant website as physical distances or borders don’t matter much when it comes to simply downloading an ebook.

How search engines like Google treat these country specific extensions adds another facet to this discussion. Search engines keep trying to present the most relevant results to their visitors. Hence when Google/Yahoo have a reason to believe that a person is looking for regionally relevant websites or content, they could push the .co.uk website results higher in the search rankings within the UK. Search engines take a number of signals to determine the relevancy of a website to a region and country and the domain extension happens to be one of them.

This becomes more apparent when we consider a non-English speaking nation like Germany or Spain. When a person in Germany searches for something on Google, it makes more sense to rank websites with content in German higher. Hence if you are making a website whose content is going to be in German and it is going to be only relevant to the German population, it would be a better idea to go for the German domain extension .de instead of .com for your website.

Takeaway: At times, like when you are creating a website that is more or only relevant to a particular country or a non-English language, country-specific extensions can be a better choice than the .com.

Newer “Generic” Extensions (.co, .tv, .me)

Since tens of thousands of good sounding domains with the .com extension have already been grabbed, there has recently been an effort to promote a few new domain extensions as an alternative to .com. The first such extension is actually a country-specific extension namely .co. Since it sounds similar to .com and is being promoted as a .com alternative, it is beginning to see some good acceptance.

The other such domain extensions are .tv and .me. While neither of them is a true .com alternative, they are becoming  popular for 2 types of websites. .tv (you are on a .tv website now!) is becoming popular as an apt extension for video-centered-websites while .me usage is also growing, especially with websites with a personal blog slant to them. What is interesting is, none of these domain extensions is really a generic extension. All three are country-specific extensions. .co belongs to Colombia, .tv belongs to Tuvalu Islands and .me belongs to Montenegro but all of these countries allow anyone to register these extensions and use them for any purpose.

Even search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to treat them as generic domain extensions.

Takeaway: New domain extensions like .co can be considered if the .com isn’t available and preferably hasn’t been used for an active website. .tv and .me are other options that can be considered depending upon what your website is about.

So what’s the combined takeaway from all this? Let’s summarize!

For businesses whose services are sought only or primarily within a particular region or country (restaurants, cabs, real estate agency etc), it’s a good idea to go with a country specific domain extension like .co.uk or .com.au (or .com if you are in US). Additionally, you should try to secure the .com version of your domain. For example, if you want to get jimspizza.co.uk, you should also register jimspizza.com if its not taken and make it redirect to the .co.uk website.

On the other hand, if your business’s services spans countries (web design agency, fashion agency) a .com might be a better choice. If you have a physical “brick and mortar” presence in many countries, then you should consider buying the domains for the country-specific .com extensions of all those countries as well.

Basically businesses should stick to the .com or its country-specific versions. Lately, some web 2.0 start-ups are beginning to go online with .co addresses as well though this might not be a great idea, at the moment, for other kind of businesses.

For all other types of websites (personal, information, niche etc), it’s a good idea to go for the .com of your choice if it is available. But if it is not and the .net or .org or any of the other popular generic extensions (.co, .tv etc) is available and it is a very attractive word or phrase, then you should probably just go with what is available and aim at making it a great website.

The only caveat that you should remember is not to infringe on trademarks. If you found walmart.tv to be available, don’t imagine that you can take it and create a great site on it. Chances are the folks at Walmart won’t be very amused and the next phone call you receive could be from their lawyer.

Also, when you register a domain, make sure that it is not a branded domain name (we discuss branded domains next) which is already established well on one of the other generic domain name extensions. For example. if you want to take maryspancakes.net but maryspancakes.com/.org already has an active and genuine website running on it (meaning it is simply not a placeholder website), you could be accused of trying to steal an established trademark. However if the .com website was taken but had no active website, you would be good registering your .net website. In such cases, it is advisable to establish your brand fast and register it’s trademark as soon as you can.

Branded or Generic Domains

A lot of people would instantly recognize Nike as a brand that’s synonymous with classy sportswear. They could associate its products with a lot of things: a just-do-it attitude, high quality, beautiful design and some of their favorite celebrities and sportstars. Non-branded products seldom connect to people at multiple levels like that. Brands, then, are rarely only names. Similarly, websites by themselves have the potential for becoming brands and their domain names can play a key role in it. Let’s see a few examples.

If you wanted to start a sportswear company, say called Steppz, and you wanted to create a website for it, you could go with three broad kinds of names:

•  a brand domain name like www.steppz.com
•  a keyword (product) domain name like www.sportswear.com
•  a brand-keyword domain name like www.steppzsportswear.com

To take another example, let’s say you wanted to create a blog about women’s cosmetics, you could go for:

•  a brand domain name like www.always18.com
•  a keyword domain name like www.womenscosmetics.com
•  a brand-keyword domain name like www.kayscosmetics.com

All the classes of domain names have their upsides and downsides and what kind you choose depends upon your preferences and what you have in mind for your website.

Branded Domains

Brands aren’t built in a day. Once built, they can last for decades. It takes time and hard work before people can readily recognize what the brand is about. When a brand resonates with a lot of people, it creates a following.

Going with a branded domain has the same challenges as brands in our physical lives. People won’t recognize what the website is about (from its domain name) till it is popular. Making it popular takes time and effort. You might want to make the intended personality and attitude come through your website. Once popular, it is usually easier for such a website to sustain patronage (and multiply it) when compared to non-branded and impersonal websites.

Domain names with real names can also be considered as brand domains. For example, Steve Pavlina, a software programmer turned personal development coach, has one of the most popular blogs on self-improvement with the domain name www.stevepavlina.com. His character comes out through his writings which have a lot of personal touch. Now, Steve Pavlina (and his domain name) have become synonymous with self-improvement for a lot of people in the self-help circles. When your readers can begin to relate to you as a real person, your name can become your brand online.

An added advantage is, because of all the creativity you can use while thinking of brand names, it can be relatively easy to find the .com (and .net/org etc) version of your brand name available.

Keyword Domain Names

Having keywords in your domain name (like in www.cars.com) readily indicates what your website is about. This sometimes plays out as an advantage when people who are interested in the keyword topic check out your website when they come across your domain name (online or offline). If not for the keyword they might not have done so.

Though these domain names tend to sound slightly impersonal, with effort, you can build a brand even out of them. Blinds.com, for example, is a popular website that sells window blinds across the US and makes around $85 million in revenue every year, as of 2012. It is said that many people find the website by word-of-mouth recommendation.

Keywords also make it easier for search engines to determine the central topic of a website if there is one, so chances are that your website could rank higher on Google, when your domain’s keywords are “searched” for. For example, when people search for “kitchen knives” on Google, the website with domain name “www.kitchenknives.com” has an advantage when it comes to search rankings.

A point to be noted though: During the 5-6 years leading up to 2010, websites with keywords in their domain names had a definite advantage in the search rankings for those keywords. As a consequence, just about every domain name (especially the .com but mostly the other extensions as well) containing all the popular keywords that could be searched for, were grabbed.

Some of these domain owners went on to put spammy content on these websites and slapped advertisements all over their website. Soon these websites started appearing on the first pages of Google for their corresponding keywords, much ahead of many other genuine websites, even though they didn’t offer much value to the visitor. Soon Google and others took note of this problem and started giving lesser importance to the keywords in the domain name in search rankings.

Takeaway: Going for a keyword domain name just for the search engine ranking advantage isn’t really a good idea. Search engines change and improve their algorithms and given how these domain names were misused, it is highly doubtful whether the keyword in your domain name will hold any or much importance for search engines going forward.

Moreover, as would be expected from the above keyword-domain-rush story, it is very difficult nowadays to get any keyword-domain name with popular keywords in them. In most cases, even the .net/org/info and other extensions are taken.

Brand-Keyword Domains

These are the domain names that have both a branding element as well as the keywords denoting the central idea of the website. Considering the earlier example, www.kayscosmetics.com makes it amply clear that it is about cosmetics while “Kay’s” lends it a bit of a branding. It has most of the advantages of both brand and keyword-domain names while less of their disadvantages.

To add, it is generally easier to find brand-keyword .com’s to be available than the domain names with just the keywords.

That might make it sound as if one should always go for brand-keyword domain names but that is obviously not so. It depends upon what resonates with you.

Overall, each class of domain names has its advantages. I personally feel brand and brand-keyword domains do great for a very wide range of websites, be it authority blogs, personal or business websites. Keyword domain names do well for blogs and niche-websites that exclusively talk about a certain topic. It is easier to build personality into a branded website and establish a personal relationship with its visitors than through a keyword-domain website.

Short vs Long Domains

Short domains are attractive for a lot of reasons. They can be catchy, easy to remember (especially if they can be easily pronounced) and easy to type.

How often have you found yourself typing “google.com” in your web browser?

Websites that attract repeat visitors (for example your favorite news website) usually have some percentage of type-in traffic – that is, people who “type in” the address to reach the website. While these people could bookmark the websites if the names were longer, keeping the names short gives them the comfort of simply typing it in from any computer and giving visitors even small comforts can be a positive thing.

If your domain name is very short, you could share your websites’ links on popular social media services like Twitter, which restrict the number of characters per post to 140, without having to use URL shorteners all the time.

Sometimes, longer names can be abbreviated to make them short and desirable. International Business Machines, more popularly known by their abbreviated name IBM, obviously went with their shorter version www.ibm.com.

But then, are short domain names always better and long domain names always bad? Not quite.  Take, for example, a domain name like www.jkszl.com. It’s just five characters but it isn’t any of the things I just said short domains can be, neither catchy nor easy to remember. Compare this with the domain names www.dogtrainingsecrets.com and www.investmentbankingtricks.com. These domains definitely don’t carry home the prize for being easy on your fingers, but they can be easily remembered and easy to share by word-of-mouth. Plus they don’t exactly sound bad.

So how long is ok? That’s a tricky question. The maximum length allowed for domain names is 67 characters but when forced to go for long names, I’d try very hard to limit myself to 25 characters and rarely ever go to 30 characters.

Generally though, around 8 characters would be great, 8 to 12 ideal, 12 to 18 characters more realistic and still good. I’d try not to go over 18 characters but if the shorter version were not attractive at all, then I’d just take the leap and go with the longer version. Looking at it from another perspective: number of words instead of characters, I’d say 1 word is best, 2 is good and 3 is ok.

Web 2.0 businesses ideally stick with shorter domain names while other types of websites still do great with longer ones.

Singular vs Plural Names

It really depends upon the focus of your website. If your intention is to talk about just one (your own) survival kit and teach people how they can do it themselves, www.diysurvivalkit.com makes more sense. If you are focusing on multiple survival kits available on the market and reviewing them, www.diysurvivalkits.com makes more sense.

Some people wonder which version will get them better rankings in the search engines. I have seen that it really does not matter and would be surprised if going forward search engines specifically favored one over the other. They really shouldn’t because their real intention should be to show the most relevant results. So whether you search for ‘car’ or ‘cars’, ideally neither car.com nor cars.com should be preferred to the other by the search engines just because of their domain name.

What you should probably concentrate on is this: if you are creating a website with repeat visitors in mind, go with whatever is the best fit for your website’s content. Try to please your visitors first and then bother about search engines. As search engines improve, you’ll see that pleasing visitors and search engines requires the same thing.

Other Aesthetic Factors

Most of the remaining factors I discuss are related to aesthetics more than anything else. Let’s have a look.

Hyphenated-domains

Personally, use of hyphens in domain names looks unprofessional to me. In my earlier days, I had some domain names with hyphens and I had a difficult time feeling fully satisfied when working on their websites. Every now and then, I’d have the thought “Maybe I could have got a different domain name.” That, of course, might not be the case for you.

They pose other problems as well. Domains with hyphens are difficult to share by word-of-mouth. Imagine sharing “www.dog-training-secrets.com” on the phone with someone. “Dog hyphen training hyphen secrets…” I’m sure you get my drift. Also, people are generally prone to forgetting things like hyphens since they are not so common.

But that is not to say hyphenated domains are absolutely taboo. There are many domains with hyphens that appear on search rankings (so search engines definitely don’t penalize them as of now). I am beginning to see even some established companies use domains with hyphens. Maybe the shortage of good .coms doesn’t leave many options around and hence their acceptance might increase in future. But even when you have to absolutely use them, try to keep the hyphens to a minimum. Don’t-go-crazy-hyphenating-everything!

Numbers

When numbers are used with some kind of taste or purpose, they are fine in domain names. www.37signals.com is the website of a popular agile software products company that goes by the same name. When the numbers serve a purpose like in www.economics101.com (“101” is famous from college courses in US, where “101” denotes introductory courses), they can be fine. Of course, not everybody would know their meaning and numbers are easy to forget.

When they are used like the following, they look spammy to me and I am guessing they could look non-attractive to lots of people.

• www.2c00l.com (confusing)
• www.bikereviews2.com

Some people try to replace “to” with 2 and “for” with 4 in domain names. This might be slightly more desirable than the above two examples, but still finally depends upon your tastes. Personally, to me, it doesn’t look very aesthetic or professional, so I try to stay away from such usages. Be assured though, that they do figure in search engine rankings, and it doesn’t seem using numbers like this in domain names affects it negatively from the point of view of search rankings (and it probably shouldn’t, too).

Other Qualities

Being unique, easy to pronounce and spell (not having multiple possible spellings for the same pronunciation), easy to remember are other qualities that could all help a domain name’s attractiveness.

Techniques to Think Up a Good Domain

Now that we’ve seen the most important factors, you should have a fair idea of what extension you are going to go for, whether a branded domain would serve your long term goals better or not and the other stuff on the list.

Here are some techniques that will help you think up a nice domain name for your website. Needless to say, having multiple equally good options is beneficial since all names that you come up with might not necessarily be available.

Scope of Your Website

This isn’t essentially a technique to arrive at a domain name, per se, but it is still important and you’ll know why in a moment. If you have something like an informational blog in mind where your focus is on a particular topic and you want to go with a name that has the topic keyword(s) in it, then just stop and make sure that those keywords are really going to be your central focus and that they are neither too narrow nor too broad compared to what you intend to write about in your blog.

For example let’s suppose you intend to write about and review women’s cosmetics and come up with the name www.kayscosmetics.com. If your blog becomes popular and you slowly want to cover women’s handbags as well, they might seem a little misfit under a website called Kay’s Cosmetics.

On the same note, if you started a blog called “Six Pack Abs and You” but soon wanted to expand into covering men’s health in general, you might feel a little stifled with a domain name like www.sixpackabsandyou.com. Keywords tend to lock you down into areas and it could be slightly difficult to expand beyond the fences if you want to. This isn’t really a big problem if you are very clear about what you want to do and what you don’t want to before you start your website.

So if you are shaky about the scope of your website, now is the time to make up your mind. Are you focussing on too narrow a topic such that you won’t really be able to find stuff to write about after sometime? Or is your view too broad, where it is going to be difficult for you to keep up with the needs of your audience?

Name of Your Website

If you already have thought up a name for your website, know that a lot of people would expect your domain name to reflect your website’s name. That’s because when someone arrives at your website through short URLs (like bit.ly links) or through other click-throughs, they are more prone to see your website’s name rather than your domain name. When they later want to visit your website, they might just type-in your “website name dot com” to see if they can reach you. If they don’t, you lose out.

So if your website’s name isn’t available and you can help it, consider changing your website’s name, unless of course it is a very conscious decision to have a domain name that isn’t the same as your website name.

Keyword Synonyms

If you’ve decided to go with a domain name that has a keyword in it, try doing some research to find out if a synonym of your keyword has a better appeal with the masses (or simply sounds better to you!). A thesaurus can help. You can also use the Google Keyword Tool to find out terms closely related to the keyword you have in mind and see if they sound like a better name.

For example, a search for women’s cosmetics on the keyword tool shows me that beauty products is a related term that people search for a lot more than women’s cosmetics. They mean almost the same thing. Does ‘beauty products’ make a better term in your domain name than ‘cosmetics’? You will have to decide.

Prefixes and Suffixes

When you come up with a great keyword domain name, you’ll often find it taken by someone else (and I’m sorry to be the one bringing you that heartwarming fact). However, you can find a whole lot of meaningful domain names, and sometimes much better than the keyword itself would have been on its own, by adding prefixes or suffixes.

Common examples of prefixes: ‘my’ and ‘the’; common suffixes: ‘zone’ and ‘online’. There are hundreds of suffixes and prefixes that you can use to find an available domain name. So, just say, if you wanted to start a blog about a place called Hillcreek covering all about its people, its culture, places to stay, tourist attractions and interesting nuggets, you could want to register www.hillcreek.com. However if that is already taken then you can consider something like www.hillcreekonline.com or www.myhillcreek.com. This technique usually works out great as there are so many prefixes and suffixes that the chances of all of them being taken are pretty lean.

Brainstorming

When going for branded domain names, you have a lot of options to exercise your creativity.

Brainstorm with people who understand or are interested in the idea of your website. Think of all the various words that your topic relates to (in any way). Some of these could be used to create catchy or creative names.

Let’s pick an example to get an idea. If you are setting up a website for a new unnamed furniture shop, there are various angles you can pick. Remember that this is essentially like naming a new business but would serve well for a business or blog’s domain name as well.

I’ve borrowed ideas for this illustration from this question on Quora, and added my own contributions to it below.

First, get a list of words you can work with:

• Think of materials that can possibly be used in making furniture. General terms like Timbre (or Timber – US spelling) or Wood, more specific terms like Oak, Birch, Maple, Pine, Mahogany or Cherry.
• Words that can relate to your skill, product or design. Words like Kerf, Dado, Stile, Tenon, Burl, Bevels, and Crowns
• Related words like Blinds, Flitch, Chips and Sawdust.
• Styles you make: Modern, Country, Victorian, Retro, Jacobean, Italian or French

Now you can play around with these words and other ideas in a lot of ways.

• Names that imply your work: Wood Works, Timbre Works, Wood Werx, Oak Works, Poetical Wood, Timbre Poems, Cherry Picks, Wood Arts, Pine Arts, Designer Woods, Country Oak
• Lyrical names like Woodcasso (imposing Wood in Picasso), Woodvinci (imposing Wood on Da Vinci),  Timbre Woods (sounding like Tiger Woods)
• Real words with common words from above. For example: WoodPecker, WoodLark, WoodChuck or WoodLore
• Word combinations like Oak & Birch, Blinds & Bevels, Bevels and Burls, Stile & Style
• Names that imply your target customers or style: MetroWood, RetroWood, UptownFurn, Country Crowns

Many of the above could make a great branded domain name. Adding your city’s name (or popular abbreviated form) to the domain name could also be a choice.

In some cases a visual thesaurus or a tool that finds related words can be of some help in this type of name-creation.

Ask Your Friends

Once you have a potential list of names, run the names through your friends to find which one resonates better with them. The opinions of those interested in your website/blog’s topic could be valuable as they’d be similar to your potential audience. Ask them to rate your choices and for new suggestions as well – you never know, someone could come up with a killer name you missed yourself.

Use a free survey tool like SurveyMonkey (they have a free plan that should be enough) or KwikSurveys to create a small questionnaire. You could, for example, list your top-5 choices and ask your friends to rank them. Give them space to give their own suggestions or ideas. The answers you get could help you refine your own choices and maybe arrive at something better than you’d thought of before.

Other Languages

This technique can, occasionally, get you good and stylish names even though it may go against some guidelines (like being easy to pronounce or spell),

For example, if you are have a fashion blog in mind, french words like ‘madame’, ‘mademoiselle’ and ‘beau’ or Spanish words like ‘senora’ and ‘senorita’ could lend a stylish touch to your blog name.

Domain Hacks

Consider the name: easy.ly

When read without the dot, it sounds like the word “easily”.

Consider these:

• nevermiss.it
• tune.in

The first one reads like the phrase “never miss it” while the second one goes “tune in”.

All of these are examples of real domain names that use the domain extensions (also called as the top-level-domain or TLD) as part of the original title. .ly, .it and .in are domain extensions, just like .com or .net, for Libya, Italy and India respectively.

Using extensions like these in domain names is called as domain hacks.

A lot of web startups have come up in the recent years that use domain hacks for their company’s domain names. What about blogs? Sure, I’ve spotted a few folks using these kind of names for their blogs as well. In fact, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress (the world’s most popular blogging platform), has his blog running at ma.tt (real short, nay?).

Personally, it sounds cool to me. However, it can lead to confusion when it comes to search engines. For example, when someone searches for “tune in”, Google is going to have a hard time deciding if it should list “tune.in” in its top rankings or not. If that doesn’t sound like a problem in your case, domain hacks open up a whole lot of interesting possibilities and you might want to explore them.

Dropping Vowels

Another trend is to drop vowels, especially the last one, from domain names. Flickr has the ‘e’ dropped from “Flicker”. Tumbler without the ‘e’ becomes Tumblr.

Definitely a technique to consider, especially if you are web startup.

Fun Tools to Find Great Domain Names

Sometimes, it can be a real challenge to find a good domain name. It’s especially so because many variations of popular words, phrases and even good sounding names are already taken by domain-squatters (those nice people who register domain names without the intention of building websites for them, in the hope that someone desperate to have those domains will come along and buy it from them for the price of a Ferrari).

To cool-aid the situation, a whole lot of services have sprung up. They offer various ways to make your job a little easier. Looking up a particular domain name’s availability in multiple domain extensions, automatically searching for suffixed or prefixed versions of the names or suggesting similar domain names – there is a service for all of them. And more.

Here are my best picks:

BustAName

This is one of my favorites and one that I use the most often. It offers multiple handy tools and options.

The Quick Domain Check tool allows you to look up the availability of domain names as you incrementally type-in the letters. However, only 3 extensions namely .com, .net and .org are checked for.

The Word Combiner allows you to create wordlists. It then combines words from different wordlists and shows you if any combination is available across any of the domain extensions chosen (in the Options pane at the bottom).

What’s more – you can specify prefixes and suffixes, allow hyphenation, last-vowel-drop and pluralization of words in your wordlists. All this is very neat considering it can save you a lot of time by checking all the possible combinations without missing out on some, which is possible if you were to do it manually.

It would have been great if there were an option that allowed checking only for forward-word-combinations (for a 2-word-phrase, always picking the first word from Group 1 and the second word from Group 2 respectively and never in the reverse order of the groups), as this would have made the resulting list of potential domain names to check for, much shorter. Not a great shortcoming though and hopefully they’ll add that feature in the future.

And then there is a Domain Maker that is useful for creating brandable domain names. It allows you to specify a keyword, the keyword position (start with, end with) and then comes up with natural sounding words containing the keyword. I’ve personally not found great domain names this way, though sometimes it does come up with a few interesting suggestions.

DomainTyper

If all you want is to check the availability of domains across different extensions, then this simple tool will suffice. Just like BustAName, it shows you the availability of domains for different extensions as you type the letters. The advantage here is that you can specify a whole lot of other extensions as well.

It simultaneously generates some random brandable domain names at the bottom. There is a domain hack tool at the bottom but I’ve found that this sometimes generates domain hacks which are wrong and hence useless.

Domai.nr

This service specializes in domain hacks and does it pretty well. It shows various possible domain hacks for the names you type in and their availability status.

DomainHole

This one’s got a whole lot of powerful tools. I haven’t really used this as much as the others but that’s because I only recently came to know about it.

It’s got instant check (see availability of domain names instantly as you type for .com/net/org), complete check (for a whole lot of domain extensions), name spinner (this let’s you append popular prefixes, suffixes or other terms from specific fields to your keywords and search for them), name generator (a brandable domain name generator where you get to specify the number of letters and the positions of vowels in your domain name) and a brainstormer among others. To me, the name spinner is the best tool in this service as you readily get a whole lot of word lists which you can use to generate some good domain names. Definitely worth checking out.

None of these tools can really replace you. Due to their natural limitation of not being able to ‘think’ like a human for your particular keyword or idea, they might not be able to come up with stellar names on their own. But if you use your imagination and use these tools smartly, you might just have the killer domain you wanted in no time.

A few parting words…

That brings me to the end of this guide. I’ve covered everything I had to say about finding potential domain names for a website. Once you find an attractive domain name, register it immediately before someone else grabs it. And if you need some help with building a website on your domain name, check out this guide where I lay down how it is done step-by-step.

If you find a domain name that you really seem to like but it doesn’t have all the ‘positives’ on its side, worry not, for there are folks who have happily ‘violated’ many of these guidelines and made it fabulously big. Perhaps only to show us that there really are no rules.