Domain registration or choosing the name of your website is the first step towards building a great website. Having said that, it’s not a simple job to do. The reason being that the domain name you select is not just a name; it has to be representative of your business/company, your services, and your products and more importantly the domain name must be representative of your company’s image. You must consider whether your domain name is easy to remember. A wonderful domain name but a hard to remember name would not be of much help. You should also consider whether the domain name looks correct and sounds good.
When zeroing on a domain name, make sure that it contains a keyword and avoid the usage of hyphens or underscores in the domain name. They are the most difficult to remember domain names. Most importantly, avoid using a domain name that’s in conflict with any trademark related issue. Just do a small research for the name-whether it’s been trademark by some other body/organization. If not, why don’t you go ahead and trademark it.
The next thing to consider is the extension to be used. Most web sites have .com and it is also the preferred extension but you can always look at other extensions if the domain name you selected is not available with the .com extension. After all, your site would become popular because of its content and not the extension.
Also, when you are checking whether a domain name already exists or is registered remember, that a domain name may be reserved without appearing in the DNS. You can consider using DNS tools to check whether a domain name has been registered. There are many DNS tools available like nslookup or dig to find out about domain names. You can also use Netcraft which has a huge list of web servers to search the domain names associated.
Once you have secured rights to an exclusive domain name, you can also consider selling it. Suppose a new band has very recently come up-lets call it Rockford and you happen to register the domain name Rockford.com. In such situation, there might be a music company willing to buy this domain name from you at a price higher than what you could have expected to earn from the domain. It would be a nice idea to sell the domain name as you are getting money without having to create the web-site and then do SEO for it which can be a very painful and slow process.
