How to Choose a Domain Name — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] watching, in this video I'll walk you through five tips that you can do to pick the right domain and then I'll cover a couple of tools that you can use to help with that process even more. So if you're ready let's get started, but

[00:15] before we do that make sure you click on the subscribe button. You'll be the first to make sure that you stick with a .com domain name. There are a lot of new

[00:27] extensions out there like .blog .photography but you'll want to stick with .com because people are used to the .com so even when you're telling them So if you can stick with that. The next tip is to keep it short. You want to keep

[00:43] it below 15 characters and ideally if you can get it below 12 then that's even better. Keeping it short should just help your users to remember the domain name. Next, make it as brandable as you can. You want it to stand out and you want it to

[00:56] be unique to the readers you'll also just want to get something that is catchy and something that is easy for them to remember an example is amazon.com is way more brandable than buying books online.com. Next, you want to avoid

[01:09] hyphens in the domain name there was a big popular push to add hyphens when they couldn't, when people couldn't find the domain name that they wanted to register but it increases typos when people are trying to remember it, it

[01:23] the case but hyphens in a domain name are usually perceived as spammy. So avoid them if you can and then finally leave room to expand so what do I mean by this?

[01:36] Maybe you want to talk about gardening and specifically you want to talk about tomatoes but maybe later on down the line you might pull in other gardening aspects like growing cucumbers or something. Instead of creating a domain

[01:49] name like ILoveTomatoes.com make it a little bit bigger with gardenersdelight. com or something like that and that just gives you a little bit more room to about tomatoes and it's time for you to move on into another arena within that

[02:05] same topic. Okay now that we've gone over the tips let me show you quickly a few websites that will help you find your best domain name. The first one is nameboy, it's one of the oldest name generators and what you can do pretty much with all

[02:19] of these websites is you enter one or two of your keywords that you want and when you click Submit you'll go through and bring back some suggestions. The second one is IsItWP. If you go to IsItWP.com

[02:33] I'll go over to tools and we also have a domain name generator here. Same process enter one or two keywords and find the domain names. Geat now that you've picked the perfect domain name we need to register the domain name before

[02:48] someone else does and there are two main ways that you can do that. The first way is if you don't have your hosting provider set up then you'll want to set up and I'll have a link in the description below but you can set up and

[03:02] go through Bluehost is who we recommend and with our discount you will get a free domain name when you sign up for hosting and then also in the next video I'll walk you through the whole process of setting up your hosting account and

[03:15] setting up your website so you can do that. If you don't need a hosting account and you just need a domain name there are several registrar's who will go through the process of registering your domain name for you. The one we

[03:27] recommend is domain.com. They're one of the best domain registrar's on the market, they offer all top-level domain names, they also have a smart search feature, premium domains if you need to purchase one that you found but it's for

[03:41] domain once you have it and in addition to that, domain.com is offering wpbeginner readers and our YouTube viewers a 25% discount. I'll link to that

[03:54] in the description below as well. So those are the five main tips on how to domain name did you go with? Share your domain name in the description below and thanks for watching