Back in college days, I used to be a domain freak wasting lot of money on buying domains and not doing anything with them. I think the most fun part was to choose the best domain name as I loved spending hours searching for what domain names available. Since back in college I had lot of spare time (I had pretty much stopped studying after second year) so it was alright but I am not sure now i will be spending hours looking for best domain names, the same can be said for most of the poeple.

Saying this, Domain names are very important for branding and you want to make sure its really good in terms of how it stands, look, written, pronounced etc.

Here are few tips and guidelines from my experience of buying domains on How to Choose Best Domain names -

1. Avoid Hyphens - Since most of the domains are already registered, people have started registering domain with hyphens which is alright to an extent as long as its short and one hyphen and related to your site but otherwise avoid hyphens and specially avoid domains with multiple hyphens. www.ultimate-flash-games.com is not very cool.

2. Stick to .com - people say use the TLD (top level domains like .com, .org etc) as per your convenience so if you are building personal website, you can use. info but I feels its good to always stick with .com. They are brand able and far easy to remember and most of the people associate websites with .com only.

3. Keep it short and sweet - Long domain names with multiple words in them really don’t appeal much and often forgotten by first time users, specially if they have found your site through search engines. So keep the domains short and sweet which is easy to remember.

4. Look for branding too - Since almost all the domains with all the possible common combination of dictionary keywords are taken, its better if you focus on branding. For example, mwolk don’t mean much (I am pretty sure it don’t mean anything in any language) but its a pretty decent name for branding and once you remember it, you won’t forget it. Infact make up your own domain

5. Get as many vowels as possible - yes, best domain names always have good number of vowels as they are easier to remember and pronounce.

6. Avoid using hard to pronounce characters - There are few characters which don’t look good in domains as they are hard to pronounce like Q, W, X, Y, Z so try to avoid them unless the overall domain is easy to pronounce.

7. Overall domain name should make some sense - I have seen people with domains like qwhty.com, gmw101.com and kopcwd.com which have no meaning, make no sense and worst, impossible to pronounce. Always avoid such domain names. If you follow Points #1 to #6, you should be able to avoid such domain names.

This should do it for you. Just use your common sense and think from users point of view and you should be able to choose best suitable domain for your website.

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