When you want to find a domain name that is striking to go with your current business, or because you are starting up on the web, you may be puzzled about where to begin.

First, you will have to accept that the top generic names – the 'beachfront properties' of the internet – are all already owned. In fact, it may already be true that every dictionary word hasalready been taken. That is because more and more users of the web have become clever enough to simply type a likely name into the domain address field of their browser. As an example, a surfer looking for info about coffee, or wishing to purchase coffee online would just put coffee.com into the web address field. This gives a good result, and is faster than using a search engine. The site owners, of course, get huge amounts of traffic to their sites.

These kinds of names – like business.com, piano.com, and so on may be open to offers by their owners, but be willing to spend a fortune to get them. I take it as read you are not in this marketplace, which is ridiculously overpriced, but wish to buy a fresh, relevant name, which fits with your business or subject for your new domain.

Doing it this way, there are many clever options available. Too look at them, I'll use an example. My theme for the new web site I want to build is collectibles. I do a quick check, and find that all the dot suffixes for the word collectibles itself are taken - .com, .net, info and so on.

One way of proceeding is to add a relevant adjective, and make a two word name. Things like small-collectibles.com, discount-collectibles or golden-collectibles.com may be appropriate for your site, and still give potential visitors a good indication of what your site is about. Using free key word tools like keyworddiscovery you can insert your keyword and actually discover what searches searchers are using when searching.

Performing a search, words like avon, military, nascar and so on are popular words available to combine with 'collectibles', depending on whether they are in accord with the subject of the new site. Even MyCollectibles has a ring to it (think of myspace.com).

Sometimes, this method of checking what searchers want will actually reveal a good idea for the subject of your new site.

However, if your business or idea has a geographical element, you can combine that with the subject of your site – mytown-collectibles, discount-mystate-collectibles or similar.

You can also consider the option is adding a single letter prefix. For my subject, this would give me iCollectibles or eCollectibles, or the hyphenated forms, as a good set to look at. You could also use a given name in combination with the subjectof your projected website, depending on how familiar you would allow your online business to be – britneys-collectibles.com.

Another, and completely different option is to buy a meaningless name, and spend some time and money on its branding. Words like google, yahoo, kazaa, and skype are examples of this. It may be hard to credit, but these were formerly words unknown to any dictionary. Wouldn’t you like to own those domains today?

By : Dee Buteland