Building a company website has turned out to be a mandate prerequisite for setting up any business. Today’s internet world has transformed customer’s perspective of choosing the service providers. Now, the emphasis is majorly on online promotion. In such a scenario, it would not be wrong to say that if you want your business to flourish, you surely need a website.
Post taking the decision of website designing, the next challenging task is to conduct a domain name search for the website. This task can be simplified to a great extent by using domain name search tools for this search process.
Domain Name Selection Process
Domain name is important because:
- It is a key part of your branding.
- It affects your SEO.
- It is difficult to change your domain name at a later stage because for doing that, you need to move your site, redirect links, change logos and let people know about the change.
The basic criterion for choosing domain names is:
- Decide over the focus of your business i.e. whether it is for National, International, or Local target audience.
- Check whether the website would focus on multiple businesses simultaneously or just one.
- Scope of focus expansion.
- Should be unique and descriptive.
- Advisable to create portmanteaus i.e. combination of two (or more) words or morphemes and their definitions to create one new word, like Groupon or Pinterest.
- Could be easily typed into the address bar with minimum chances of typos.
- Should support search engine optimization i.e. domain name should be such that it improves the ranking.
Domain Name Search Tools
You can start the domain name selection process with brainstorming your domain name ideas on paper. However, there are gazillion domain name search websites that can help you in this challenging job. These domain name generators take your keywords as input and provide you with unique word combinations. They also allow you to search the names with Domain Registrars to check the availability.
The most important yet tough task in website designing is to elect a perfect domain name. A plenty of search tools are available online that ease your search process by checking for the domain name availability and proposing similar names related to your search.
You can discover your favorites among the top domain name search tools available that possess an assortment of features. These tools are but not limited to:
Domize
This tool supports “Power Search” feature which enables you to search a large combination of terms by entering a list of words, letters or numbers separated by comma.
Features:
- It is a fast, Ajax-based search engine that you can use to rapidly check the availability of domains.
- It has an iPhone app.
- Offers speed and security to search domain names in an encrypted environment.
- Checking the uniqueness of the domain name.
- Provides instant results.
- Indexes millions of DNS records of expired and unused domain names.
- Searches by prefix and suffix, and sorts the results by length, readability, and popularity.
- Provides five more filtering criteria in order to refine the results.
NXdom
Features:
- Indexes millions of DNS records of expired and unused domain names.
- Searches by prefix and suffix, and sorts the results by length, readability, and popularity.
- Provides five more filtering criteria in order to refine the results.
Nameboy
It is a popular domain name generator that centers its results on a “Primary” word and a “Secondary” word.
Features:
- Has a smart engine that creates name variations from the sound and meaning of the keyword.
- Immediately color codes the results depending on the availability status of the domain name.
- Has a “Rhyme” option that tries to suggest domain names that rhyme with the search input phrases.
Domainr
This is an innovative tool that allows you to explore domain name space other than the obvious .com, .net, and .org thereby discovering new and interesting domain names.
Features:
- Searches and tracks over 1,700 top-level domains and over 1300 generic TLDs, that could be registered at one of 219 accredited registrars.
- Helps you explore other TLD’s that have made popular websites like last.fm and del.icio.us
BustAName
It is a robust and feature-packed domain finder that finds domain names using linguistic data.
Features:
- Allows you to save and manage/organize your searches for future.
- Has a “List of Words” feature that suggests similar words to your search.
- Helps you find the perfect domain name by using its word combiner, finding similar words, and checking for available domains.
- Saves domains for review, switch the word order to create new domains, and combine up to three words.
- Creates groups of words to craft domain names, use hyphens, plurals, or even drop the last vowel.
Namestation
This domain search tool has a smooth interface as you can easily enter suggested keywords and combine them with prefixes and suffixes.
Features:
- Allows you to combine keyword lists, add suffixes, generate phonetic names and alliterative names with hundreds of categorized wordlists for a search engine friendly domain name.
- Quickly checks alternative name variations and receive keyword suggestions.
- Browse definitions and semantically related words for more inspiration.
- Refine your search criteria to generate more targeted domain names.
Wordoid
This is a domain search tool that has a unique way of generating name ideas. It can make up words that sound natural, almost natural, or hardly natural. The interesting part is that it can do that in five different languages — English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. You can even mix and match languages to create a unique blend.
Features:
- Limits the unique name to a set number of characters.
- Allows you to change the quality level from low to high.
Dot-o-Mator
It is a web tool that suggests site names based on prefixes and suffixes of the input keywords. Alternatively, you can use a category of prefixes and suffixes to generate suggested site names for you. It’s a helpful tool for, at the very least, obtaining inspiration for a site name.
Features:
- Has a fun tool called Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator that generates “Web 2.0” site names like “Yakidoo” or “Zoompulse”.
- Allows you to create domain name suggestions by selecting a list of words for the beginning and end of the domain.
- Also available as an iOS app for use on the go.
DomainsBot
It is a domain search engine operating since 2004 with an “Advanced” search feature in order to conduct a more customized and refined search. This advanced search includes:
- Setting the maximum domain character length to eliminate lengthy domain names from the results
- Excluding domain results that have a hyphen (-).
It takes your ideas and turns them into names, showing available domain suggestions; alerting you of expired, expiring and for-sale domains; and providing a Whois search.
Features:
- Offers corresponding Twitter and Facebook identity suggestions.
- Accompanies iPhone app to find great domains.
Domain Tools
It is a set of domain name search engines that help you uncover relevant information about certain domain names.
Features:
- “Whois” search: reveals records about the party who registered the domain
- “Suggestions” search: helps you find similar domain names
- “Domain Search”: shows you what TLDs of a domain name are available, and domain names that are “For Sale” or “At Auction”.
Conclusion
The choice of a domain name greatly impacts the success of a website in almost every area including, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Presence of an appropriate keyword phrase is beneficial as it acts as a ranking factor and encourages other webmasters to include.
In short, it would be safe to state that a proper domain name search tool is extremely important to find a nearly perfect domain name for your website, which in turn, would undoubtedly attract more and more target audience thereby increasing the company’s sales and revenue graph.