What Should You Look for in a Domain Name?

By | June 20, 2011

It was Shakespeare who wrote “What’s in a name?” He was using lofty language, of course, to communicate some lofty ideas – but we in the domain name industry know just how practical this question can be. After all, if you’re buying a domain name just for its name alone, then the name is everything.

It leads to another question: what makes a good domain name? What should you look for in domain names that will lead you to finding the domains with the most potential and yielding the highest possible returns on investment? If you’re still asking yourself these questions, you’ve come to the right place. Because that’s exactly what we’re going to tackle here.

1. Look for keyword relevance.

The most obvious feature of a domain name you’ll want to pay attention to is the domain name itself. What keywords does it contain? Is it easy to remember, easy to understand, and do people frequently search for these keywords in search engines? Each of those questions will need to be answered if you’re going to understand what keyword relevance is all about.

Some domains could be more or less valuable than you think because of these issues. Consider “Microsoft.com.” By itself, it’s not exactly a great domain name. But because it’s so highly relevant – that is, so many people are looking for information and products from Microsoft – it becomes a highly relevant domain name.

Similarly, you might find a domain name that doesn’t represent a specific brand but contains the keywords that people are looking for anyway. These domain names can also be highly valuable, and you should certainly look into buying them.  To understand this, you’ll want to try some independent keyword research – use tools made available by search engines like Google and Yahoo in order to check on keyword popularity. You might be surprised to see which keyword phrases aren’t as popular as you thought – and which are far more popular than you might have imagined.

2. Look for popularity.

Other times, you’ll buy a domain name not because of its potential, but because of its established web presence. A domain name might not have a lot of keyword relevance as it pertains to the section above, but because of an already-established presence, it can still be a highly valuable purchase. So look for websites that come with an audience already established, and you can still find some good purchases.

Popularity can be measured a number of ways. The amount of visitors per month is a surefire way of measuring it, but there are some other variables to look at. How’s the ad revenue? Do the people who visit the site actually stick around, or is the traffic mostly worthless traffic? True popularity means that a site not only has a lot of visitors, but a lot of participating visitors. Remember that when you go to make a domain name purchase.

Remember: you can review plenty of available websites to purchase right here at WebsiteBroker.com.