Small Business Domain Names Selection Tips

Effective domain names selection is a critical factor for your small business. How to select them? Here are my tips:

Domain selection tips
How I've selected this domain?
Recommended Resources
Related Articles

Domain selection tips

Register your domain before registring your business name. This way you ensure that the domain is free and unique. (for details, look at my other article on creative business names).
Make your domain search-engine friendly. Search engines are an important source of highly motivated, ready to buy traffic for your site.
Carefully include high traffic words within you domain to greatly enhance your search engine
visibility for those words. Use wordtracker to find the best words (a free trial is available here).
The domain should contain several search words. Separate those words with dashes (not underlines).

Once you have a domain name, focus on building content for your website. Why is this important? Content brings traffic. Look at the CTPM process to get a full explanation of the subject.
Don't register too many domains - beyond the commercial hype, there is no shorage of search-engine friendly domain. If you are after building a business, it's too much trouble to manage many domain names. Your business image needs to be unique, and this image is not easily replaced. (If you use multiple domains, make sure that the content of each domain is unique. Search engines may view multiple domains which include the same content as spamming.) .
If you are a professional, consider words such as "how-to", "guide", or "consultant", "advisor" which expose your profession.
Your domain should combine popular words with words which are specific to your specific business profession.
When people recommend your site, the domain name is always embedded inside the recommendation. This is another reason to choose popular search words within your domain name. This way:
1. Your target audience will know what your site is about even before pressing the link to your site.
2. Your link exchange efforts will have much more powerful effects. The search words are found inside your domain name, and hence they will always be contained within the incoming links which recommend your site. Hence, the search engines will give you much better ranking.

How I've selected this domain?

My other site, Hitech-dolphin.com, is about Inspirational and Healthy Work Life Today. But most of the search-engine traffic I got was for dolphin-related keywords. hitech-dolphin.com is a beautiful name, but the name doesn't fit the site purpose. Hence, much more work is needed to get focused search-engine traffic.

I've decided to build a more focused site. I've started by selecting a target audience - "small-business". Then I focused on my professional area, the area in which I can write with passion and integrity - "web-hosting". And then I've added alittle personal touch - "strategies". All words contain dashes, so that the search engines can recognise the single words.

Recommended resources

Why register a domain name when you can also build a business? - The most integrated small business site building tool is SBI. Besides registring your domain, this all-in-one solution has tens of other features geared towards the business site user. It is not only taking care of the domain registration for your but also guides you on all the other aspects of building a successfull website. Look at the results of the CTPM site building process.

Register domain names at godaddy - this is the cheapest domain registar which is still reliable and ICANN-accredited. It's also very popular, and has a good management interface.

Take a look at my web hosting glossary for a full list of no-nonsense article with business strategy advice.
Take a look at my small-business web-hosting strategy guide for more articles on effective web hosting and strategies for your business