What is a domain name?
They are used by websites all over the world to make it easy for visitors to remember the website address. It’s much easier to remember a name instead of an IP address. The website address consist of two parts- a domain name and an extension
For example
In ‘Google.com’, Google is the name and .com is the extension. Popular extensions include.com,.net,.org and.info. There are more than 200 domain extensions in the world. Some ccTLD (country code top level domain) extensions require the buyer to be a citizen or have a business license in the country, but most domain extensions can be registered online by anyone anywhere in the world without any paper work.
In order to buy a domain name, one must first check if its available or not. Most good.com domains have already been registered. So it’s almost impossible to find a great.com which it still available to register but one can always buy good .coms in the secondary market from sites like sedo.com
Things to look for when searching for the perfect domain name for your site:
1) It should be short and easy to remember.
If it is too long, visitors will find it very hard to remember the address of your site, hence affecting the traffic to the site
2) It should be relevant to your business or the topic of your website
3) The extension should be relevant (.ng extension for a company based in US isn’t a great idea)
4) If the domain you want has already been taken by someone else and they haven’t already built a site around it, the chances are that they waiting to sell it for the right price. Try to buy the domain from the registrant but don’t overpay for a domain.
Where to search for domain availability?
All domain registrars allow the users to search for domain name availability on the extensions that they are licensed to register. Most of them will also suggest available domains which are closely associated with your search. However the domain search on the registrars website, generally tends to be quite slow and time consuming. A better idea would be to use specific domain search tools which allow a user to search on multiple domain extensions at one go and also allow users to save a list of domains for later review. There are many domain search tools available on the internet and most are free to use.
