I received an email this morning from someone asking about domain name ideas for a new site they want to launch. After writing a long response, I decided to post it here also. Comments?

Thanks for the email. To start, you might consider reading this pretty decent article from TruthMedia about choosing domain names.

My advice is to go with something that is:

1. Easy to remember
2. Easy to spell
3. Not confusing
4. You can get both .com and .org (if possible)

You have to remember there are 3 ways someone gets to your website:

• They type it in the address bar
• They search for it in a search box
• They click on a link from somewhere else

Search engines don’t put much (if any) weight in the name itself. I don’t know why. I would think they would, but they don’t seem to care. I guess they don’t as much because of cyber-squatting (people buying domain names of a brand and putting something else there). So to me, a good domain name has to pass the “human” tests, not the “search engine tests”.

If you find one that qualifies for the my 4 suggestions above, then it’ll make it easier for people to get to the site through the 3 ways possible.

Now, for branding, that could be different. In my opinion, if you can find a name that follows my 4 suggestions and is descriptive of what you do then that’s great. Actually, it’s what your audience would appreciate (you wouldn’t have a site named OurEvangelisticSiteForTeens.com).

But you can come up with a name that has nothing to do with what you offer as long as it meets my 4 suggestions above. From that point, it’ll take a lot of marketing for people to realize that unassociated name = what you want them to know. For instance, “Yahoo” and “Google” are words that have nothing to do with “find things on the internet”. The word “eBay” has nothing to do with “online auction”. “Amazon” is a river, not an online retail store. “Orangejack” means nothing! But branding on their part makes us know those words mean something different now.

So it’s up to you. I think best is to follow my 4 suggestions and if it is descriptive of what you do (or what you want your audience to do), then get it. If not, try a catchy brand name (knowing it’ll take a lot of marketing to make it work). Else, settle for something less desirable but satisfies most of the suggestions.

One last option: consider making this a brand extension of your current main site by using a subdomain. Not as clean, but if the main brand is strong then you could borrow from that strength and use a subdomain like subdomain.domain.com. I think a strong domain is always better than a subdomain, unless you have a really strong domain like Yahoo or Google who can get away with tv.yahoo.com, maps.yahoo.com, local.google.com, etc. In addition, if you go with a subdomain, your search engine rankings might improve some. I’m not sure though if they carry the same weight with it. But if you link to a stand-alone domain name from the strong main site, that’ll help the rankings.

One last tip: It would be great to get the opinion of some in your audience. Shoot an email to some of your most interested and vested members who would use this site and ask them.