thrashiedean.com

It came in my email a few days ago. \”Try this super duper domain name choosing tool! It\’s the key to all your domain choosing needs! It will wash your windows walk your dog, mow your lawn, etc. etc.\” Enough already! I tried the tool, I typed a keyword into the box. It regurgitated a series of hyphenated strings of words which in reality, would not work by any stretch of the imagination.

You can do better! With a little creative thinking & some word play, you can come up with a much more human sounding & workable domain name. So, how do you select a domain name?

I would say, to look for something related to whatever business or idea you\’re trying to promote, of course. If you can match up the domain name, the business name, & have something that will provide a good title tag for the browser, & fit the keywords & content well, you must be super man, but it can be done.

1. Get a concept, an idea of what you want the domain to say. Is it going to be a local business? If so, use your city name, or something from your area. The city I live in is in an area known for rose growing. It\’s commonly called \”Rose City.\” If I wanted to start an electronics business, I might look up the domain name \”Rosecityeloctronics\” or Mycityelectronics.

2. Play with concepts related to your business. If I owned a trenching company, I would think about what we do in that job. We trench, we dig, we dig digging, how about wedigdigging.com, or digdigging.com

I enjoy playing with words, & coming up with new catch phrases. There is more. This is one example: In the process of having some magnetic signs made for my brick & mortar business, I realized that to get everything I wanted on the sign, & still have lettering large enough to be visible to people in other vehicles, I was going to have to cut the text a little bit. I wanted something like: \”Outdoor Pest Solutions, We Can Help, Even if Your Lawn Is a lake!\” to emphasize that we do not just handle lawn pests, but also rogue vegetation in lakes & ponds. I also wanted to use some phrases such as \”bugs & weeds,\” Which many people use to locate a pest control service. I played with the idea a little bit, & came up with the phrase, \”Outdoor Pest Solutions, From Lawns To Lakes\”, & then shortened this to, \”Outdoor pest solutions, Lawns to Lakes.\” I added in the phrase \”Bugs & Weeds\” Even with this addition, this cut the whole thing down to a usable level. It came out like this:

Line 1. Outdoor Pest Solutions.

Line 2. Bugs & Weeds.

Line 3. Lawns to Lakes.

This reduced the original by about 10 spaces & even allowed for an extra phrase. I liked it enough that I wanted to standardize it & make it a part of my \”branding\”, so I decided it would be very wise to get domain names for each phrase. So I now have; lawnstolakes.com, bugsandweeds.com & outdoorpestsolutions.com to stop poachers & encroachers. Any of these would make a dandy URL for a website of this type. That is a long way around to this: Use a little creativity on your own, & I\’m sure you can come up with something better for your house painting company than best_house_painter_on_earth.com. Just play with the words, & look at it from different angles. There is more. Think about what your users would type to search for your type of business.

3. Go to a \”who is\” type tool, & start entering things that are directly related to a concept that you want to use. This let us you see if the name is taken, if it is, start again. Some times in the process of doing this, something will pop out at you, very often it\’s something better than you started with.

4. Ask yourself, \”What would my potential customers type into the search box?\” Will it be a technical term, will it be a common name term? Some times we get caught up in the technical jargon of our occupations, & do not realize that the people we serve will not understand the terminology that we use to communicate with others in our industry. We have to attempt to think like a customer. That would be a good idea anyway. It would help us to serve them better… Maybe we could even do the same thing with our website design & contact information.

J. Frank Burns blogs about domain names, & Internet related social issues & environmental issues from a different perspective.

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