The most promising domain name if you are just starting out will contain the main keyword phrase that your website is about.
Try to get a name that will appeal to people searching for your main keyword phrase.
You don't need to have the exact keyword phrase in your domain, but thats the best thing to do to appeal to the person searching for your product, and it also helps tremendously with SEO. If you have www.magicianleicester.com then you won't have a hard time ranking for the keywords 'magician leicester' and 'leicester magician'.
As we're in the UK, you'll need to start with .co.uk and .com domain names, if you can get both, do so. You might also want to purchase the .net and .biz extensions to prevent anyone else from buying them. The extension that ranks the best is debatable but if you're only targeting people in the UK use .co.uk, if you ever see yourself wanting to compete internationally then get .com
An example of the above is if you are selling childrens toys, if you could get childrenstoys.co.uk then great, you'll be on top of google for that search term in no time for users inside the UK. If you ever wanted to start selling in the US or Australia or Canada (the big three of the net), then .com would be the best one to go for.
This does take us into the realms of country specific domain extensions such as .com.au (australia) and .ca (canada), but this article isn't going to get that deep.
In a nutshell, if you are targeting users in a specific country then use that domain extension.
If you are targeting internationally then get a .com unless you are big enough to create a brand new site for each country specific domain and create seperate content for each (avoiding duplicate content as far as possible).
The best Registrars in my opinion are the following
1. Dotster.com – http://www.dotster.com/
2. NameBoy – http://www.nameboy.com/
3. Deleted Domains – http://www.deletedomains.com/ – Costs extra money
4. Namecheap – http://www.namecheap.com/
Although I listed it last, I use Name Cheap for all of my domains, I also use their hosting too.
Finding Aged Domain names
If you can afford it then you can take a short cut here. You can buy an aged domain that already has backlinks and if you're lucky some Google Page Rank (PR).
Age, Links and Page Rank all help towards getting your site indexed and listed in the Search Engines.
Download and install the Google Toolbar.
After installing the toolbar, you may have to activate the page rank viewer. Do that by clicking on the 'settings tab', going to 'options', choosing the 'more' tab and clicking the box next to the page rank and page info title.
Step 1: Using Google to try identifying aged domain names that you may be able to obtain.
1. Go to http://www.google.com.
2. Do a search for your main niche keyword phrase.
3. Quickly go to each site in Google and look for extremely outdated personal sites, hobby sites, and even eCommerce sites. Also look for parked pages that do not have active content on them and sites that appear to be under construction. You may want to do this for the top 50 – 100 ranking sites in Google.
4. When you find a poorly done site that you may be able to obtain, put it into a simple spreadsheet. Next to the domain name, put the page rank of that domain name. In a 3rd column, enter the age of the domain name. All of this can be determined by entering the domain name at http://www.checkpagerank.net.
5. Once you've entered all of that information into the spreadsheet, send a quick email to thr site owner by using the email address or contact form on their site. Alternatively, you can call them if there is a phone number available. If no contact information exists, go to http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/ and do a “WHOIS” search using the domain name. This will typically give you their name, address, phone number, and email address. If the domain name is private, you will not be able to locate their contact details. Ask them if they would consider selling their domain name to you.
6. When a website owner indicates that they are willing to sell their domain name, ask them what their asking price is. Add this information into the 4th column of your spreadsheet.
7. After finding a handful of domain names that you are interested in, identify the one that you want the most and make the owner of that domain name an offer. To start off with, offer around 50 – 60% of what they are asking. Remember, if they want more than you are willing to offer you can eliminate that site from your spreadsheet of possible domain names to obtain.
8. Bargain back and forth with the owner of the domain names until you can come to an agreement on a site that you are interested in.
9. If the owner is an individual, pay them through PayPal or through escrow.com. By doing this, you are protecting yourself because these companies will allow you to request your money back if you don't receive what you paid for.
10. Once you've made payment to them, give them your name, phone number, address, and email address and ask them to initiate a transfer from their registrar to yours. (note: if you don't have a registrar I recommend setting up a free account at http://www.godaddy.com/ )
11. Once they have transferred the domain name into your account you will receive an email from GoDaddy. Follow GoDaddy's instructions for accepting the transfer and you will then take over ownership of the domain.
Step 2: Using advanced searches in Google to find potential domain names to obtain.
This process is identical to the process described above with the exception of how you do your search in Google. Rather than simply entering you main keyword phrases, use advanced search phrases that contain a root word from you niche phrase or synonyms of that root word. Here are some examples of good searches to do. You will want to replace the word 'dog' with your root word and/or synonyms of your root word:
inurl:dog “domain name is for sale”
inurl:dog “name is for sale”
inurl:dog “website is for sale”
inurl:dog “buy this domain”
inurl:dog “are retiring”
inurl:dog “have retired”
inurl:dog “out of business”
inurl:dog “domain is for sale”
NOTE: Keep in mind while you're viewing Google's results for these searches that you are only interested in looking at the domain names that would work for a store. Don't bother looking at domains that wouldn't work well. Also, remember that if a result in Google is a sub page, you need to go to the homepage to see if that site has any page rank. Sub-pages often don't have pagerank, even though the homepage may. If the site will not allow you to go to the homepage, you can enter the domain name into http://www.checkpagerank.net/ to find out if it does have some page rank.
Step 3: Using auction sites like http://www.tdnam.com/ and http://www.sedo.com/. You can use these techniques on any auction site, but for this example, we'll use tdnam.com (aka GoDaddy Domain Name After market).
1. Go to http://www.tdnam.com/ and click on the 'advanced search' link to the right of the search bar.
2. Next to the keyword tab, choose 'contains.'
3. Enter your root keyword or a synonym into the search box.
4. Next to 'auction type' click on 'select all.'
5. In 'domain extensions' select only the domain name extensions that would work well for a site selling products. We typically only search for the following extensions: .com, .net, .co.uk.
1. Click 'Go' and wait for the results.
2. When the results appear, click on the 'traffic' heading above the results to sort by traffic (in general, the sites with the higher traffic will have higher page rank as well).
3. Now that the sites are in order, most traffic appearing first, you can copy and paste the domain name into a separate tab or browser.
4. If it has page rank, you can put it into your spreadsheet. In the 4th column, put the price that the domain name is currently at and in the 5th column, note the date and time that the auction is going to end. Some domain names in the after market have the option to 'buy now' as well.
5. If you intend to try to win an auction, you will need to create an account with the company that is holding the auction. This is usually free or very, very cheap.
Getting an aged domain is NOT required, but after this step you should have either a domain or an aged domain.
Tags: Domain name, Website
