Your URL is not only your identity but your address on the web and the e-distance to your address. Apart from a link to it, the only thing— literally— between a potential visitor anywhere in the world and your site is the memorability, simplicity, and shortness of your site’s domain name.

By shortness, not just keystrokes— though that’s half of it— but the ease of saying it. How many syllables it has, and how easy it is to spell correctly on hearing. You’ll want to be able to communicate your name over the phone, perhaps even put it in a radio ad.

If in addition your name has coolness, pizzazz, is tactile and evocative of positive associations (success, romance, nostalgia, etc.) then it really has potential.

There is just one type of TLD (top level domain) that you must have and that is dot-com. You want a country code? Get the dot-com first and then the cc. A church or nonprofit? Get the dot-com and the dot-org. Run it on the dot-org but make the dot-com go to it.

Why the fanaticism over dot-com? That is what most people remember the easiest and try first if they’re not sure.

If you have the dot-com of a name and other people have other extensions of that same name, you’ll get a lot more of their traffic than they will of yours, and vice versa. Many browsers are set so if a user types in a name only, without a TLD extension, it will look for a dot-com first.

If your company, product, or personal name is unregistered as a dot-com, you’re in business. Just register it, along with likely misspellings and confused versions. For the alternate spellings either use a registrar that offers free URL redirects or a hosting service that allows them, and redirect the alternate versions to your main site.

The challenge is if the name you want is taken, and either it is being used by someone else or not for sale at a price you can afford. Or perhaps you are trying to decide on a brand new name, available in dot-com, that might also serve in naming or renaming a company or organization.

So where to begin? One place to go for ideas on what to do and not do is to look at a list of the top 100 web sites in terms of numbers of unique users. A typical month’s list (in this case the one for September 2000, courtesy the former PC Data Online— see alexa.com for more current lists) reveals certain consistencies:

All but two or three of the top 100 are dot-coms. Only one has a single numeral in its name, and none have a hyphen. Most are three to twelve letters (two to four syllables) long, not counting the dot-com. Many are comprised wholly of generic words— looksmart.com, weather.com— but about as many are invented names— lycos.com, microsoft.com.

If possible then, make this your target— a dot-com without numerals or hyphens, no longer than a dozen or so letters and two to four syllables. Of course one-syllable dot-coms are great, but since about all ordinary English one-word names have been registered, you’ll probably only find what you want at a considerable premium in the after-market.

However at the time of this writing (yr. 2000) there are still plenty of decent untouched two-word names— even two-syllable generics. I just registered roundbarns.com, a nice history and tourism generic— there’s even an annual round barn festival in Indiana.

For many applications a made-up name might do just as well.

Although a pure generic can by itself catch traffic from people typing in genericname.com, and there’s usually only one best English generic for each item (thus conferring automatic prestige)— they can be by themselves difficult if not impossible to trademark. And non-generics are usually easier to find still-unregistered.

If your site or company involves a one-or-two syllable item, theme, or product, consider making that generic (or an intelligible portion of it) only part of the name and adding a twist— an unexpected prefix or suffix, syllable, word, or word fragment— that can strike a mood, convey an image (visual or otherwise), or just evoke desired associations.

That’s what I decided to do in naming this site. It was to be about coming up with names, so I twisted raindance onto name, dancing for names instead of rain. Now, several months later, I can honestly say I’m still happy with it. Its quirkiness threw a few people initially, but name and dance are both short and easy to say and spell.

A twist can work for you by suggesting an analogous visual or mood theme. This can be carried into your site and company logo, signage and decor, helping to implant your name in memory and set you apart from the competition.

You can leave out the generic part entirely and simply come up with twist only, maybe an out-of-the-blue phase, or a single invented word— it worked for Google. People who have never heard of you won’t have any idea what you’re about until you become known, but you may end up with a name that’s zestier and shorter.

Consider all three options— generic, generic with a twist, and twist only. You’re now ready to start brainstorming.

Begin writing down ideas, good and bad, on a sheet of paper. When you have a few dozen, start checking them to see if they’re registered as dot-coms. This can be easily done at the site of any domain-name registrar.

While initially you might be discouraged at the large percentage already taken (tens of millions of dot-coms have been registered), don’t be surprised if you find that many of your best ideas (one out of fifty, one out of a hundred) are available.

Why is this? Here is my hypothesis, and it is only a hypothesis. It seems that many of the dot-coms now registered are held by investors, who buy names primarily to hold for value appreciation rather than to develop themselves. As a consequence, they can only guess at what the end-user might do with them.

The mind they can only try to enter is your mind. You probably already have a visual and tactile sense of what your site, all or in part, will look like and do. You may already have snippets of it designed or even built— on a scratchpad, if not in actual code. You have a distinct advantage.

This is especially true if you select a uniquely made-up name over a generic. An investor might regard even a relatively short offbeat name as too risky compared with even a longer generic, since any potential buyer would have to be enamored of that particular twist.

This may also suggest a winning strategy from an investor’s point of view. Say you want a portfolio of names just to hold for resale, hopefully at a nice profit. Don’t go right out and look for names. Look for concepts. Imagine you are going to build a site. Imagine every detail you can about that site. Then find the best name or names for it.

If the flow of ideas starts slowing, play the dot-com game. Dot-com words and phrases that you think or use in everyday conversation. Drive friends and lovers batty by dot-comming their every pithy phrase. Before long, they’ll be helping you invent new words and twists just so you’ll find one you like well enough to quit :-)

Eventually you should be able to narrow your favorites down to just a few available names.

Try for names with obvious, common spellings rather than alternate, less-used, or slang versions, even if they’re a letter or two longer (CarsForYou over Carz4U) so you won’t lose traffic to the preferred version. Also plural forms of generics if they seem more likely than the singular forms, and vice versa.

But as alluded to earlier, when you do register the commonly-spelled version also consider registering some or all alternate or less-used versions as well— you could use them to redirect otherwise-missed traffic to your site.

Think about branding issues. If a name is close in sound or spelling to a well-known brand, you might not be able to trademark it yourself.

If it is really close, or incorporates an already-registered trademark within itself, the owner of the trademark, through legal action via anti-cybersquatting laws, might even be able to take it away from you entirely, without compensation. A place where you can scout such conflicts for free is NameProtect.com (see link in column at left).

Check to see what if anything your prospective name means in other languages. Make sure it’s not anything either offensive or in conflict with the message or character of your site.

Last but not least, don’t forget the aesthetic of the name that is going to represent you. As part of your image, it will be vital to your success. Does it pronounce well? Is it professional sounding? Will it look good in writing?

Okay, are you ready to register? Sleep on it! The odds of a perfect name looking less than perfect the next day are much greater than the possibility of someone beating you to it during the night. Even in the unlikely event that should happen, with the naming practice you’ve had chances are you’ll find a still-better one.

The better the name you pick the better your head start toward a great site.