When starting a new business there are a number of items, which the online entrepreneur must consider before they can actually start trading, one of these is the Domain Name selection.

Branding

Selecting your Domain is just as Important as selecting your Business name, and undoubtedly you will experience the same problems as selecting a business name.

The domain name has been taken and registered by someone else or parked(bought and not being used).

Should the selected domain name be parked then it will be possible to purchase the domain from the owner, depending on how valuable the domain is to both yourself and the owner then the price may be considerable and the best option would be to select a variant of the name. To determine the owner use a whois service.

Select an alternative Domain name

All is not lost, you can in most instances add a prefix to the domain name eg rather than register the bluewidgets domain, you can select the domain mybluewidget, rather than selecting housecleaning domain select the domain greenhousecleaning.

Domain Name Hyphenation

Do not be tempted to use hyphenation to separate out the words, as this firstly makes it difficult to explain to a potential customer your web address, next it is difficult to type in and lastly Google is able to separate out words even when they are concatenated together making it possible to identify keywords. Do not use underscore and never use spaces in web page names.

Keywords

Having a keyword rich domain name can definitely assist in your ranking efforts, this will help in the linking back of anchor text to your web site. Unfortunately most of the keyword rich domain names have been taken, so that means you need to find an alternative keyword rich domain name or find a way to use your keywords while still making it easy for people to find you.

A Keyword rich domain name can also help in getting multiple pages (the famous indent) in the search engine results; thereby helping push down the competition. This technique is a technique which should be considered...

Which Domain extension

Many web designers will recommend to a business to register a ".com" and a ".com.au", however as search engines uses geo location then if your server is based in Australia then google will identify you as a person in Australia and looking for Australian results. When your website is on an Australian server then it does not matter if you use either ".com" or ".com.au". It is misleading and false to tell businesses that you must register both domains.

'IP property

In rare cases you may want to register multiple variants of the domain name to prevent other businesses from piggy backing your success and good will, however initially registering multiple variants would not make sense as there is no track record or success and should your business thrive then you can the register the other domain variants.