First practical Step for creating a website is to register a domain name. Domain name is infect the address of your website and its also reffered to as the name of website. Visitors use this address to open and visit your website so choice of a domain name is to be done carefully.

Targeting Keywords:
Most important thing while choosing for a domain name is to decide whether you want to brand your product or need some Search Engine traffic. By branding means that whether its a specific name of your product/company etc or may be your own name. For example Yahoo and Google were not dictionary or keywords to specify what they are, but now those are known as brand names. So your have option to select domain name having a brand name. But a better option is also there and that is to choose your keywords you are going to target.

Search Engines, now a days, give importance to domain name and a domain name having search terms in it gets more trafiic from Search Engines. Its fact that people search through topic and keywords so its better to use at least two major keywords you are going to target.

Country Specific or .net, .info etc
Mostly Domain Names used are .com but you must know that there are a variety of other options available. You can register .net .org .info .mobi .tv .co.uk .pk and many other domains as well. But don”t think that i am suggesting you to do so. Most of the people are only used to go for .com domains. As a webmaster you must know that if you right a domain name in adress bar of Internet Explorer or Fire Fox and press CTRL+ENTER, it automatically adds .com in the end and opens site. And in Opera, you just enter the ravianz and press enter, it will automatically take you to ravianz.com! So after knowing the above facts you must realize the importance of a .com domain. There is no harm in registering .net or some other as well to avoid competetion on the same keywords.

Length Of Domain Name:
you can register a domain name of upto 63 characters but it does”t mean that you go for all the 63 character. A domain name should be easy top remember and its length should never be more than 15 characters. Try to keep it even lesser. Keep in mind that space, underscores or many other symbols are not allowed. You can only have dashes or hyphens in domain names.

Hyphens in Domain Name:
You can have hyphens in domain names but keep in mind that visitors can easily forget about hyphens. Its not easy to remember those. Even people like me don”t like underscores in email address. A Hyphen is always difficult to type. Dont get suprized, people are too lazy to go beyond the three basic rows of key board where all of alphabets reside.

But a hyphened domain name is preferred by search engines. SE’’s consider a hyphen as a space (logically) and hence they get to know what are the keywords used in the domain name. But it may not matter a lot because you are loosing the returning visitors who were not able to land at your site because they forgot about presence of hyphens. So better option is to register a non-hyphened domain name but the best option is to regieter both and use hyphened domain names on internet to advertise or get back links.

Deleted Domains:
A large number of website are registered daily and a large number of websites are expired or deleted as well. These are deleted because either the person who registered it, no longer needs it or the product is out of bussiness and sometimes owner was too lazy to get it renewed within time. In such domain names, people might have invested time and money so it may be useful if you find a good old deleted site. You can have some built-in gifted backlinks as well. You can find some at deleteddomains.com

Spelling Of Keywords used:
One important thing to be kept in mid is that you use the correct spelling of the keywords used in the domain name. Your visitor are not going to remeber the spelling if you just tried to make verbally the keyword. I would give example of a site Walpaperz.com here. If you pronounce this word then its no problem but after some days when you again wanted to visit some wallpapers there, you may end up in typing wallpapers.com!! So avoid in creation of your own spelling and follow the dictionary.

Use of ”the”, ”my” or plurals:
If your desired domain name is already registered, it happens mostly, then you can use some additional words with the domain name. Most important and commonly used is ”the”. One example of such a website is TheDesktopFun.com. But if you have used such an additional word then don”t be shy and advertise it completely including the additional word as well. Another commonly used word is ”my”. Its upto your own convinence that you use such words or not but its better not to use though in some case it can be very successful if adding such a word makes your site SE friendly and easy to remember as well.

Another options is to use plurals of one or more keywords used in the domain name. Its not good to use plurals as people can easily forget to put an additional ‘’s”. But again its matter of your own satisfaction. I just wanted to tell you an option and its pros and cons!