A crucial building block in setting up a website is the registration of a domain name.  Whether you are building a site to advertise your local business, an e-commerce site, photo or video or music download site, information site, or if you want to start up a website to display photos of your newborn online, the entire endeavor begins with the selection of a domain name.

Then again you might ask- “What constitutes the best choice of domain name?”.  Well it depends.  For example, if you are someone who wants to build a website devoted to Spot, the family dog, then the answer is that the choice of a domain name really doesn’t matter.  Why?  Most likely in that instance you’re not looking for tons of traffic, friends and family are your desired audience, to keep them up to date.  So your domain name choice in a case like that is not as critical as it would be if you were looking for tons of traffic to the site.   

The point is that in a case like this, there is no real concern with getting a lot of visitors to the website other than friends and family and coworkers, so there is no real harm in naming the website ANYTHING, because you will be giving out the website address to a select few people.  BUT……

What if you are looking to attract customers?  And to get as much traffic coming to your site as possible?

It really pays to have a domain name that drives traffic to your site or business.  If your website is about car parts for example, do you really expect the average web surfer to remember how to get to your website if it is named “bobsthingsforsale.com” or some other unrelated name?  If you can, get your domain name exactly the same as your business, that is your best bet.  Failing that, at least try to put the category of your business into the name.  For example, a car parts website should have a domain name like carparts.com or bobsautoparts.com, something that immediately associates the domain name with the theme of the site.  It’s all about branding, and making a lasting impression on the target audience or customers.

You need to search the WhoIs database to find a domain name that has not already been registered.  To aid you in your domain name search, I have conveniently placed a domain name search engine on StartMyWebsiteToday.com for this very purpose.  When searching for the domain name, you will instantly know whether or not the domain name is available, and if so, give you the option to immediately register it.  If it’s not available, several alternative domain names will be proposed, to help you fine tune your search, or possibly giving you an acceptable alternative domain name to register instead.