Because so much is riding on it, a website domain name is one of the most important things to consider when evaluating an existing or future website. Unless you are blessed with a wonderful D/B/A (doing business as) name, like "Boston Jeep", coming up with the perfect website name can be a very difficult process, and in the case of dealer-group websites where multiple dealerships need to be represented in one name, a downright nightmare. How can something so seemingly simple turn out to be so tricky?

To be most effective a domain name should meet several criteria, and to find the one name that exceeds all others in the quantity and quality of conditions satisfied, can often require quite a bit of effort and consideration.

A good domain name should be:

1.) Available for registration: The first thing to do when you have an idea for a domain name is to check its availability. Should the name already be registered to another business, the cost to purchase it from the owner can many times be prohibitive. Here you may be better served by continuing with other ideas, and returning to investigate the purchase of the name in question, only in the event you are unable to find a suitable, or perhaps even better, replacement.In the case of Cybersquatting:

From Wikipedia:

Cybersquatting, according to the United States federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

Personally, when a name you might be interested in acquiring is being squat upon, you’re generally better-off moving on as the asking price is usually prohibitive.

Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy: In the case of a trademark claim where bad faith registration can be established, a domain name dispute can be filed with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

2.) Easy to remember: This speaks for itself.

3.) Easy to be accurately spelled-out when having only heard its mention: Ask ten people to spell-out a domain name you’re considering, but the catch is they must do so with only hearing the name and not seeing it. If one person gets it wrong, find another name.

The logic here is that if your domain name is overheard in conversation, or heard over the radio in one of your advertisements, everyone within earshot should be able to go to their computers, type in that name, and get right to your website.

4.) Descriptive of the trade it represents: Placing words like "car" and "auto" in the domain name will pay dividends, for when your domain name is combined with other properly named pages within your website, the resulting URLs become more descriptive and as such, higher ranking within search results for generic keywords. For example, an inventory page with the following URL: "http://www.acmeauto.com/new_car_inventory/dodge.htm" Would fare much better (all other things being equal) than this URL: "http://www.acme.com/inventory/new.htm"

5.) Inclusive of at least a part of the company’s D/B/A name: Where practical, you should always try to incorporate at least part of your D/B/A name within your domain name. Through doing so, you will make it easier for consumers to associate your domain name with the physical business, and eventually see the two as one. This is particularly important when advertising, as you want to maximize ROI (return on investment) by driving consumers to your website with as little confusion as possible; and once there, confident they are at the right place.

Moreover, search engine results for your D/B/A name will feature your website more favorably should competition develop for your name’s keywords.

Keyword Competition:

The higher the number of results returned, the harder it will be to achieve the coveted #1 spot on the first page of any search engine. This is extremely important. Perform a search for your prospective domain name, but without the .com extension or any spaces. How many results are returned? Less than 10,000 and you’re in good shape.

Now perform the search again, but this time, include any spaces that might be warranted.How many results are retuned now? Less than 100,000 and you’re in good shape.

Now, do any of the search results reference other car dealers? If so, you’d be wise to forget about this particular domain name, as the last thing you need is another car dealer with a similar name (or utilizing similar keywords) and a search engine ranking that your site will have to exceed in order to displace it.

Ending in .com:

Dotcom is the de facto standard. If acme.com is already taken, and you settle for acme.net, whoever owns acme.com will be thanking you for the traffic gained from your customer’s mistakenly typing acme.com in their browsers.

In the unlikely event that acme.com is not taken, and you choose to go with acme.net anyway, you will still have to register acme.com to prevent someone else from doing so, and similarly benefitting from your misdirected traffic.

Generally, a good domain name should not:

Include hyphens: The only reason to use a hyphen is because the non-hyphenated name is already taken. In which case, see "Ending in .com" above.

Include numbers: The trouble with numbers is that, with having only heard a domain name that includes a number, we have to guess as to the accurate spelling. For example, a radio listener having heard an advertisement for "cars2go.com", could type into their browser four different iterations: carstogo.com, carstoogo.com, carstwogo.com, or the correct spelling. To compound the problem, when luxury replica watches trying an erroneous spelling, the web surfer may actually stumble upon a functioning website and end the search there, never to realize the intended destination was never visited.

Consist solely of an acronym: The problem with acronyms is when used exclusively, they usually do not identify the company or the business it transacts by appearance alone. For example, the acronym for "John Doe Auto Sales", J.D.A.S., or jdas.com (in domain name form) does not let on that this name represents a car dealer. Nor does jdas.com explicitly tell us this is John Doe’s website.

Although the consideration of acronyms precludes the satisfaction of many conditions considered desirable, it is sometimes necessary to partially employ them to solve problems caused by D/B/A names that include several words; or uncommon words that are difficult to spell.

Well, there you have it, hopefully you can now better appreciate that domain naming is not to be taken lightly.

Then again, there's eBay.

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Internet / BDC reference