How to Find Unregistered Domain Names
Here are some tips on how I find unregistered domain names for new websites and blogs.
If you are starting a blog that will be like a journal of your life or business development journey then you can use your name. If you are lucky nobody will have registered your name for a domain name. If they have then try inserting your middle name initial in the name. Two words are easiest for people to remember.
Another approach that I used is to think up an alias. Like in forums where most people do not use their real name but some cool alias that they like. Try and come up with a cool two name alias that does not currently come up in a Google search engine result. This will make it much easier to achieve #1 ranking in search engines if people search on your name.
In my case, I registered NedStorm.com and that site is listed at #1 position on Google as expected. There are already people online with the same name as me so I went for this cool sounding and unique name instead.
For a non-personal site such as a digital camera review site you would want a domain name related to the topic of the site. This makes it a lot harder to find a short unregistered domain name. Nobody likes to see dashes in a domain name and numbers are often meaningless. Also you want to avoid trademark infringement so stick with generic words.
There’s not alot you can do to find unregistered dot com names that are short and meaningful but one idea I had was to slip a single letter between two words. In my case I inserted an “o” between “credit” and “cards” giving “creditocards.com”. I don’t know if this is a good or bad idea at this stage since the site has only recently been set up.
Another approach may be to string together 2 keywords and a filler word e.g. DigitalCameraDungeon
You could of course visit domain name auction sites and buy an existing name. Or maybe contact the owner of a domain name that does not seem to be actively using it and negotiate a transfer.
Before choosing a domain name and registering it, you can perform a statistical test to see if it is likely to rank well in search engines. You can use the same test to pick the best scoring domain name from a list of candidates. This could save you much wasted effort later on or give your site the best chance of success from the start. You will need this special software to perform the analysis.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:43 am
You have really come up with a creative idea! That’s sounds little easier to find unregistered domains. I have heard that if you can get an old age domain will be a great help to achieve higer position in search engine rankings, to find a domain like this with perfect matching words in it is tough though.
September 12th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Old age domains are great so what you need to do is start registering your own domain names ASAP. A few years from now, your domain names will be old in the Internet life span clock. Even domains over 1 year old have good value since many people will only go with 1 year of registration. Domains that are hosted with sites gain a lot of credibility with search engines.
Many of my sites have PR5 even with very basic content because I looked at the long term and registered domains for at least 2 years and actually used the domains to make web sites. I shudder to think what I could sell these PR5 domain names for now even though they cost just a few bucks a couple of years ago.
One of my services is to track down unregistered domain names that you could use for your business. Look at all the cool domain names I registered over the last few years in the left side bar (for example, I registered asianlocations.com for a travel site just last month) . I can always find new cool dot com names to register. Just let me know something about what you are looking for and put me to work.
I charge just $40 / £20 to find 5 cool unregistered domains for you. Send me a contact email via my contact page if you want to let me help you. Tell me about your business and whether you insist on dot com or don’t mind other extensions such as .co.uk
February 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Some interesting points mentioned. I too am amazed at how an old domain of mine that I had actually forgotten about, is a PR4… Great news for the old schoolers
Cheers,
Tristan