The most important advice that I can give you about choosing your domain name is don’t try to be catchy or clever.  Keep it simple and make it something easy for your customers to remember.  A name that uses your primary company name or an associated word will get more attention in general and will be taken more seriously by your prospective customer.

You will be ranked higher by the search engines if you use keywords associated with your business or theme.  For example; if you had a business named: Antique Musical Instruments then antiquemusicalinstruments.com may be more effective than just instruments.com for those with a primary goal of selling antique musical instruments.  Just try to make it pertinent to what you are doing.

You may be thinking that the domain name used in my example is too general.  In this case, you may consider using more than one domain name with more specific keywords.  For example, antiqueguitars.com, antiquepianos.com, antiquebanjos.com, etc.  The idea expressed here would be to create pertinent pages for each domain specifically then link them back to your main page which would be your business name; antiquemusicalinstruments.com.  You would have to pay for each additional name but the option for extra domains depends upon your business type, size and competition.  Keep in mind domain names are not that expensive anymore with an average price of about $9.00 a month.  Most noteworthy hosting services will provide the domain name free with the first year of hosting.

The other reason for a more specific name are your email addresses.  They  could all contain your business name or even product name which would give your business a very professional feel. When customers get emails from support@antiquemusicalinstruments.com they feel as if they are dealing with a stable, professional operation.

On a final note for those considering ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ servers that provide free domain names like; www.something.com/yourdomainname.  While this may be the least expensive way to get going, it may get you dropped or passed over by some search engines.  Search engines show preference to www.yourdomainname.com period end of story.

Remember get your customers trust you need to show them that your business is reputable, reliable and will be around awhile.  You can show it in your domain name.