Many people who wants to launch a new business or have a great idea for a new web site, often struggle to find a decent, available (as in not already registered by somebody else) domain name for their web site. Naturally, disappointed business owners will sometimes complain about it, although, as the service policy says: first-come, first served. In my own experience, there is always enough un-registered domain names waiting for the first owner, but many fail to think outside of the box and only look for very popular names and combinations.

The first thing to realize is that many obvious domain names are indeed taken. I mean domain names consisting of a single word are almost guaranteed to have been registered already, or popular phrases and names using the .com extension. With that said, you should always check none the less. Sometimes what you thought was a domain name that’s impossible to fetch, has expired or been canceled for whatever reason, and others haven’t discovered it yet.

On the other hand, do not give up on finding a domain name describing your niche with a catchy phrase or one word, even if it has been taken. One of the key things to remember, is that a good name is not at all necessarily the same thing as the most obvious name.

Would you for instance consider the possibility that the founder of Microsoft.com or Apple.com would have simply drop their business when they learned that obvious domain names such as mediaplayer.com or applecomputers.com were already registered? If you look at domain names like slashdot.org, which is a popular and well known technology news site, their domain name doesn’t give away the purpose of the site too easily. Finding a decent domain name requires that you take a different and fresh approach.

This is not quite all that there is to it, either way; Though your brain obviously is your most important tool when searching for available domain names, it would not hurt to take advantage of some automated help as well. In fact, there are numerous websites to help you find new domain names using combinations of keywords that you feed it, as well as giving you suggestions based on perhaps a theme of your choice, or keywords.

When you keep searching and find that all the variations you would want are taken, consider other domain extensions. For SEO (Search Engine Optimization) traffic, it doesn’t matter whether it is a .com or .info, as people find the domain by doing a search and the search engine returns your website when it finds certain keywords or combinations.

These are factors to consider before registering a new domain name: How many back-links do your competitors have? How old is their domain, is the content high quality e.t.c. You will be surprised sometimes how easily you can outrank your competition in Google, even with a domain name that is sub-optimal compared to theirs.

I use a domain name containing two keywords for one of my affiliate links. The link is Cash Affiliate, and when using the anchor keyword “Cash Affiliate”, every time someone searches for “cash affiliate” (some 18,000 times in June), they will see my link first, if it has some authority back-links. Otherwise the link is ACME People Search, but it looks better when using the first URL.

Access timely experiences to one way links – welcome to your personal guide.