The first thing to consider about domain names is the price you pay.

A fair price is £25 for a .com (for 2 years) and £9 for a .co.uk (for 2 years). Some companies offer very cheap domain names but you must be careful because many of these cheap offers tie you into lame hosting deals or other hidden costs. We recommend: www.easily.co.uk
The second thing you have to consider is how your chosen domain name will be seen by search engines; if you buy the name www.jsmith.com because your company is called J Smith Ltd this will mean nothing to search engines but if J Smith Ltd is a building company then www.jsmith-builders.com would be more helpful to search engines. Your domain name is the first thing search engines look at when deciding what your website is about. Remember the name of the game is to help search engines realise what your website is about!

Cover Yourself! If you can afford to, buy both .co.uk and .com versions of your domain. This will prevent competitors buying them and causing brand confusion. Think, if you avertise www.jsmith-builders.co.uk, some people may type www.jsmith-builders.com and end up on a rival website. Bad news…you paid for the ad! This is standard practice for big corporate companies; they always make sure nobody can hijack their name.

You may not have been able to aquire the keyword rich domain name that you feel you need, but you can include your keyphrases into the address of your pages no matter what your domain name is.

For example:

www.yourdomain.com/florist_in_milton_keynes.html
www.yourdomain.com/flowers_milton_keynes.html
www.yourdomain.com/flowers_roses_milton_keynes.html

Using keywords to name your pages will help with search engines.

So to sum up, don’t pay too little or too much for your domain name. Always pick a name that describes the business you are in and buy at least the .com and .co.uk.