How to Find a Good Available Domain Name

With so many domains already registered, it can be difficult to find a good available domain name.  Whether you are trying to register a name for your personal website, business, or just a blog or informational site, you should never settle for an unattractive domain.  There are many options available for getting the keywords you need in a .com and possibly a .net.  Try these suggestions and you will find a new spectrum opens up from which you now have several choices on what to register.

How to Find a Good Available Domain Name


First, let's look at your personal name.  Say you are David Smith and you can't afford to buy your namesake off someone else.  One option is to try DSmith or DavidS.  If the one-letter method doesn't work, try adding a middle initial or name to the mix.  For example, DavidASmith, DASmith, or DavidAndrewSmith could all be nice substitues.  If you are still unable to find an available name, try inserting a hyphen somewhere in the mix to form a domain like David-Smith or D-Smith.  Last, you could always add the word site to one of the aforementioned examples. 

Next, say you want to make a brandable cat food company name.  Obviously you would have liked to have had just cat food, but with that  name long gone, you want to carve out your own brand.  A great place to start is by taking the words cat and food and brainstorming any synonyms or similar words onto a notepad.  Then, try fusing the words together to form a one word combination that runs smoothly.  You could also go another route and take the root of one of the words and add a suffix or prefix.  Common brandable domain suffixes include -ia, -icity, - ology, -ification, -us, -o, -a, and many other letter combinations.  For inspiration, try searching for some of the major companies and notice how they transformed a made up word into everyday language.

Finally, if you just want to make a website or blog about something but have trouble finding a workable web name that fits your keywords, don't despair, you can always find something in a .net or a .com by being creative.  Let's pretend you want to start a website about video games, but the condition is you must include those keywords for search engine optimization or SEO purposes.  Good thinking.  Let's run through some quick prefixes you can try: e-, i-, about-, my-, the-, best-, good-, all-, just-, cool-, elite- and go- are all potential add-ons that don't increase the domain length by too much.  Now try some general suffixes: -web, -net, -gold, -files, -blog, -box, -wire, -news, -info, -room, -pro, -city, -site, -talk, -max.  Obviously, you will want to tailor your add-ons to whether your root keywords are singular or plural, but given the amount of options you have, by the time you are done you should have a nice list to choose from.

The domain name suggestions for finding a good domain above are merely the tip of the iceberg.  Use this article as a baseline guide to spurn even more creativity and ideas for having the perfect web address for your site.