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Your domain name is the beginning of your branding strategy and the clincher in your hosting package. You need to make sure that it is unique and memorable.

Note that there are exceptions to every rule, so sometimes it is a good thing to buy a domain name. Still, to keep your costs down and to avoid getting sucked into the cycle of picking unimaginative domain names, you have to understand the process of picking top notch and unique domain names for yourself. We will look at various ways of picking domain names. These include key word research and constructional linguistics, picking names that have personal significance, brainstorming to come up with off the wall and unique names, and even simply stringing together a couple of keywords to get a domain name.

The Brand
Your domain name is your brand. You can permanently disable your branding efforts if you pick the wrong name, however at one time or the other, we all make SEO trade offs in the belief that the SEO gains are more important than the branding losses. Let's do a quick comparison test; http://www.gizmodo.com/ and http://www.computer-stuff.com/ both offer information on hardware and new technology. Type "computer stuff" into Google; there are no prizes for guessing that http://www.computer-stuff.com/ is number one on Google's SERPs. However gizmodo is clearly the stronger brand, despite the off the wall domain name with zero key words in it (gizmo doesn't count).

Before going into details of the mechanics of picking domain names let's look at some basic branding laws which we should consider. The laws are excerpts from Al and Laura Ries write up called "The Eleven Immutable Laws of Internet Branding," which is found in their excellent book "The 22 Immutable Laws of branding" at www.ries.com.

A Proper Name
This law states that "your name stands alone on the Internet, so you'd better have a good one." Right now, Yahoo's most valuable resource is not the email service, or Yahoo! 360, or their search. Their most valuable resource is the brand name.

Of you launch a web site with a good concept and a good name (a proper name as opposed to a generic name), in the long run, after all the generic web sites have bitten the dust, you will win big! Like I said there are exceptions to every rule, but long term, for branding purposes a proper name (Gizmodo, Yahoo, and Google) has a bigger chance of succeeding than a common name (computers, business, search).

Once you are online your most valuable resource is your domain name. Here are some rules that should be followed as we look at the law of the "Proper name." Note that there are exceptions to every rule, however following any of these rules improves your chance of picking an exceptional domain name.

Short and Simple
The shorter your domain name, the easier it is for your user to type it into the address bar. Conversely, the longer it is, the harder it is to remember the domain name. Also it should be simple. I have to admit that I have broken this law at least three times: I have chosen domain names that are far too long in order to cash in on short term SEO key words. In one case I agreed to a 19 letter domain name for a non-profit organization. And I once bought out a fifteen letter domain name for myself (hopefully I will withstand temptation next time it comes).

An example of an ideal name is www.cnet.com. The company took the generic term "computer network" and shortened it to the word cnet. This satisfies the short and simple rule and also does a little bit of constructional linguistics along the way.

Unique, Speakable and Shocking
To fulfill all of the above three conditions together will be hard, but the first two are absolutely essential. Still, when we look at how web sites pick names in the next article we will see how to use constructional linguistics, brainstorming and personal experience to pick a unique name. The only way to create a unique name is to build it from scratch; a proper name is always unique. Some of the most unique names online include www.google.com, http://www.phlameworks.com/, and www.yahoo.com. All of these are proper names; none are generic names.

Apart from being unique all the names are speakable. The easiest way for users to remember a name is by hearing it being spoken. If you have an unspeakable (literally) domain name, nobody will pronounce it to their friends, family and acquaintances. Most people shop via recommendation; the first time I ever heard of Google was via word of mouth. The same was true with P2P software limewire, as well as www.downloads.com.

Most sites I find online via search engines, and I bookmark them if I want to remember them. But any impossible to speak domain name will ensure that at least ten percent of buyers will miss your web site; that is the percentage of the buying public computed to suffer from some form of dyslexia. An excellent illustration of a web site that puts me through pain, which I have long since stopped using with any real frequency, is gotenborg.com -- or is it gutenbog.com? Actually it is a dot org; now how was I supposed to remember which is which? The best way the people at gotenborg.org could have kept me happy would be if they had every possible variation to the name. Take it for granted that I failed several times at referring the above site.

Not all names should be shocking; indeed, not all names can be shocking. But monster.com wins all my prizes when it comes to shock value; in my opinion that name was an excellent idea. Dice comes close to it, but I sincerely do not see how far a site like careerbuilder.com will go (it comes in a distant third or fourth). Another set of web sites which have great shock value as names include some financial services sites -- and everybody assumes financial services are tame! These include names such as http://www.motleyfool.com/ and www.morningstar.com. They are not too short but they're easy to remember mostly because they are shocking. It's also worth noting that they have no key words connecting them to financial advice.

Name Your Site After Yourself
You can be the celebrity CEO of your own super famous site. This particular tip is not for shy retiring types. But if you find yourself famous then make the most of it by promoting your sites. In the entertainment industry this rule is probably the most used. Colorful lively personalities are used to represent seemingly futuristic domain names, such as rapper "The Game" with www.blackwallstreet.com and Eminem with the site named after himself. As another example, Def Jam records have become synonymous with their flamboyant CEO Shawn Carter along with the domain name defjam.com -- maybe Lyor Cohen (Def Jam's past CEO) was a better manager, but Shawn Carter is definitely a bigger brand, with his exploits splattered over the covers of newspapers and magazines.

Names inject life, warmth and humanity into a brand, especially if the domain name is inane and slightly boring. In the technology field, tech people like Eric Schmidt, Bill Gross, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and a host of others make us take a look at different sites. When Danny Sullivan began Searchengineland.com, the only reason I bothered to check out the website was simply because Sullivan was such a strong and influential brand all by himself. Another individual that is building a great profile online is Matt Cutts. If he ever loses his job as Google's top spam buster, he will surely be hired as an SEO consultant if he decides to go that route.

If you want a famous brand then it is best to take it for granted that you (the individual) will become famous too. Note that the laws are not meant to be followed rigorously, but as applicable guidelines (if your name is not shocking and you are famous, there is an obvious clash), any one of them is good as a stand alone guide, and all work. The main point is that everybody knows what's acceptable and what's not after they sit down in teams to brainstorm for new domain names -- for example, you want to have a good reason to tell your partners why you think computershop.com might not be the best name for your fledgling website. Now let's look at two more laws.

The Name Should be Alliterative
This is by no means a hard and fast rule; personally I have picked names for web sites that satisfy almost every law apart from this one, simply because some other guideline seemed more relevant at that time, but some great offline and even some online examples make this law very realistic if closely examined: Volvo, Google, Amazon, Vastavista. It could be used in combination with short and simple to get excellent domain names. Now let's move on to a final law.

The Name Should be Suggestive of the Category
This was one of the laws which I had issues accepting fully since it seemingly contradicted with some of the above laws, but over time and as I studied domain names, I recognized it as the basis of constructional linguistics. A good illustration of a very successful site that has a good name which is suggestive of its category is CNet; another is www.techrepublic.com. Yet another is www.seochat.com; names like www.aspfree.com and even http://www.devhardware.com/ come up as winners.

Keep in mind that you can't always be guaranteed to come up with a winner using this rule. A roster of successful picks does not mean that you do not fall into the generic trap when you take things for granted.