A domain name is like a storefront of your business in the cyberspace. Nowadays it's hard to imagine any sucessful business with a vision can live without a website. The advantages are many, the main purpose of your website should be to serve your potential customers, so when people type in related keywords in the search engine, it'll be easy for them to find you.

When thinking for a domain name, consider the following:

Follow up:

Include the keyword of the main service that you provide

If you are building a brand, consider using your trademark, company name or even your own name if you are branding yourself

If you are running a business, the best choice is still a .com domain, or be country specific, e.g., .co.uk, .co.za, .co.nz, .com.cn etc.

With country specific domains you'd pay more than a .com domain. A .com domain costs $10 per annum and a country specific domain would cost around $50 to $60 a year

The advantage of this is that search engines like google, favor country specific domains when displaying the search results if the user uses google search outside the U.S.

The purpose is still to best serve users to locate services they look for, and if you own a country specific domain, you have an edge over the .com guys.

You may consider this as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

Now write down the list of domain names you've come up with, then go to godaddy.com or 1and1.com to check whether these domains are still available. Consider use .biz domains only if .com domains aren't available. If budget isn't a concern, country specific domains are definitely better than .biz.

Godaddy is the planet biggest domain registrar as of today and you will have an easy to use complete DNS control interface which allow you to edit your A records, MX records, DNS records etc later on. It's very transparent and you may consider hosting your website with godaddy later on. Their hosting plans start from $4.95.

If you are concerned about your privacy, then consider register your domain privately. 1and1.com has the cheapest private domain registration I have ever come across, there are other welknown domain registrars like domaincheap and network solutions, but none of them could beat this single best deal offered by 1and1.com, I never used their webhost services, but I have most of my domains registered privately with 1and1.com

For those of you who don't know the difference between private domain registration and public domain registration, here is one example to show you the difference.

When people, for any reasons want to dig a bit more under your domain name and find out more about you, they can simply type your domain name into a free domain lookup service and if your domain is registered publicly, they will see the information you provided when you registered your domain name, e.g. your full name, your address and your contact phone number.

But if your domain is registered privately, it will only display the contact information of your domain registrar, e.g., if it's godaddy you registered with, godaddy will appear under the contact name and the company's address will appear under the address and godaddy's phone number will appear under the contact phone number etc.

So you are fully protected in this situation. Private domain registration is definitely what I recommend, unless you are Microsoft, Macquarie, Merrill Lynch or any other big names.

.mil .govt .org are domains reserved for millitary, government and none profit organizations, if you are running a business, these aren't going to be appropriate options.

You only need to check the availability of the domain you want to register once using either godaddy or 1and1, or any other domain registrars if you prefer, if a domain is returned as unavailable by any of the domain registration providers, it's not available, that's it. You won't find a different result if you waste time search from a different website.

You may register your interest to a specific domain once it's expired and not being renewed. This is more advanced and consumes more time, so you may explore these later on. You will want to use godaddy as it provides some more advanced domain related services like domain evaluation, domain auction place, etc. Even private domain registration costs a few dollars more than 1and1.

For advanced topics on keyword research by using keyword search tools please click here.