Your domain name should reflect be your company’s name, describe the services you provide, or describe what you sell. Keep your domain name as brief as possible, to make it easy for your customers to remember.
A domain name must be at least two characters long, and can't contain illegal symbols, such as $ # or @. Underscores and dashes, however, are acceptable.
Top level domains, or TLDs, are the letters after the "dot" in a Web address. There are several different types of generic TLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and many others. The first three are by far the most popular, and you should attempt to register your name with one of these three extensions.
Whenever possible, register a domain with the .com extension. Most users automatically associate a domain name with .com. If you are using mybusinessname.info, and another company has mybusinessname.com, you will most likely lose customers to them. Adult sites frequently use domains that coincide with the .com versions of popular domains, in the hopes of getting more traffic to their site. This is the last thing most small business owners need.
If the domain name you want isn't available (and odds are, it isn't), you'll need to compromise. This may mean selecting some other configuration of your company name or product, or possibly buying a domain with one of the less-popular TLDs.
It's getting harder and harder to find good domain names that haven't been registered, but with some creativity, you should be able to find one that suits your business and provides a good description of your products, services, or scope of your business.
1) Perform a keyword analysis. First list all words that are relevant to your business. Now pick all those words that you think people use to find you in a search engine. Rank these keywords in order of popularity.
2) Pick your two or three main keywords. For each one, write down synonyms or almost-synonyms. For example: if your keyword is "car" you could add to this list: auto, automobile, autos, cars, van, truck, vehicle, wagon,...
3) Combine the words in the lists to make candidate domain names. From the first list, take the first word and combine it with the first word from the second list and the first word from the third list.
4) You can also have a list with prefixes like i, e, www, b2b,... or suffixes like 4me, forsale, and so on. You can combine these with all keywords.
5) Decide whether to use hyphens or not. A simple rule: "use hyphens whenever you suspect people will type in your keywords in one search term". For example, "usedcarse4me.com" is better than "usedcars-4me.com" because people won't remember the hyphen. But "national-car-rental.com" is better than "nationalcarrental.com" because approximately 15000 people use exactly these three words as search term each month and the domain with hyphens is likely to show up higher in the search results.
6) Decide on your top-level domain like .com, .org or .net. A very simple rule of thumb: use .com unless you have very good reasons not to. The fact that the .com is already taken is *not* a good reason.
7) Rank the domain names in order of attractiveness, verify whether they already exist with a whois tool, and register the best one.
