When you want to find a good domain name to go with your existing business, or because you are starting up on the web, you may be puzzled about the best way to do it.

Firstly, you must accept that the most obvious names – the 'beachfront properties' of the internet – are all already registered. Surprisingly, it may already be true that every dictionary word hasalready been registered. The reason for that is more and more users of the web have become well-informed enough to simply type a likely name into the web address field of their browser. As an example, a surfer looking for information about coffee, or wishing to get coffee on-line would just type coffee.com into the web address field. This gives a reasonable result, and is quicker than using a search engine. The site owners, of course, get huge amounts of traffic to their sites.

These kinds of names – like guitar.com, ribbon.com and so on may be open to bids by their owners, but be willing to spend large amounts of money. I will take it for granted you are not in this marketplace, which is ridiculously inflated, but wish to buy a fresh, relevant name, which fits with your enterprise or theme for your freash web site.

Doing it this way, there are many smart ways to proceed. To explore them, I'll use an example. My subject for the new web site I want to create is collectibles. I do a fast check, and find that all the three or four letter suffixes for the word collectibles itself are taken - .com, .net, info and so on.

One option is to add a good adjective, and so make a two-word name. Things like large-collectibles.com, discount-collectibles or golden-collectibles.com may work for your site, and still give potential visitors a good idea of what your site is about. Using free key word tools like keyworddiscovery you can type in your keyword and find out what searches people are using when searching.

Actually doing this, words like antiques, vintage, gifts and so on are popular words easy to combine with 'collectibles', obviously if they respect the purpose and focus of the new site. You could also try thinks like mycollectibles.com (consider myspace.com).

Sometimes, this method of discovering what people want will actually give you a worthwhile idea for the subject of your new site.

However, if your business or idea has a geographical element, you can combine that with the subject of your site – mytown-collectibles, discount-mystate-collectibles or similar.

You can also consider the option is adding a one-letter prefix. For my subject, this would give me iCollectibles or eCollectibles, or hyphenated versions, as a good set to look at. You could even use a given name in combination with the subjectof your projected site, depending on how personal you would allow your enterprise to be – robs-collectibles.com.

Another, and completely different option is to buy a domain name with no meaning, and spend some time and money on its branding. Words like google, yahoo, kazaa, and skype are examples of this. It’s hard to believe, but these were formerly words missing from any dictionary. Wouldn’t you like to own those domains nowadays?

To read more about choosing a domain name, and how to make money from domains, read my page about registering domain names.