Later this week I am working with two different clients to select new domain names for websites that have been up for about a year. Both are small businesses.

In one case the domain name seems huge.  It is 30 characters before adding any of the http:// or .com which is another 11.  All together, that’s almost 1/3 of a Tweet just to text the domain name!

The other business has a pretty useful domain name.  Their name follows good small business practice of using at least one keyword in the domain name, it is fairly short and is also a .com.  But new state regulations are soon to make the keyword used obsolete.

As I review their websites and at look at their online business opportunity I have some ideas for new domains.  So I go to Google so see how it is indexing domains and keywords in context. I also click through to potential competitors listed in the search listing to see how they use the keyword in their domain.  A couple of observation I am really surprised how it seems that Google includes common abbreviations for the tested keyword in the returned search results. And how effective Google is parsing out at contextually almost any form of the keyword term from domains. Use the abbreviation as a keyword and Google  even returns the full word as a keyword.  Bing not so much.  (Sometimes I worry that  we are risking becoming a search marketing mono-culture.)

Searching for some other thoughts on selecting a small business domain name I came across these considerations/ideas.

• Most small businesses do not have the money and good luck to create a new term and make it useful.  Names like Xerox or Google or Bing take a lot of both.  We only hear the ones that succeed or have big fails.  There are a lot of others.
• “.com” is still the most valuable TLD.  The most common usage assumption is that a business domain name will end in “.com”.  There is thought that .biz, .info and similar are not as well indexed as .com, .org and .net.  I don’t know.
• Hyphens or dashes are not needed to help the search engine parse out a keyword.  But they do seem to help the search engine some parse out an abbreviation. (I may be wrong, but that is what I believe I am observing this weekend).
• Two keywords are better than one.
• Military and government websites use a lot of almost cryptic abbreviations and subdomains in their domain name. This may be a consideration if  military/gov is connected to your target market.
• Shorter domain names can be more useful than long ones.

Not sure how all this will impact the new domain names.  In the end a domain name is personal influenced by a lot of factors.  It is after all the domain name often becomes the name of the business for a large market segment.  Here are the typical limitations for what a domain name can be -

• Use only letters and numbers
• Hyphens are ok, but not at the beginning or end.
• No special characters, such as   ! @ # $ % _ ^ & * ( ) ? are allowed
• And “only” 63 characters from dot to dot.

If you want, the Wikipedia has all the domain name details

And I think this article from SEOmoz provides a great 12 point domain name picking run down.  I use it often as a check list. You may not cover all 12, but have a reason for when you don’t.

Lastly if you find just the domain name you love and it is available, get it that minute!  It is only about $15 or less to register most domain names and if you don’t get it when it is available, you may end up paying a lot more or never get it.  For a little background on why that is, read these blog posts on domain name poaching or kiting.

• Network Solutions Sued for Domain Poaching
• 35 million names registered in April. 32 million were part of a kiting scheme. A serious problem gets worse.