A good domain name is an essential part of the overall design of a website. A name plays a prominent role when people discover, think about, remember, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a certain theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time.

Here are some tips that will help you select a great domain name.

1. Brainstorm keywords
When you first begin your domain name search, it helps to have 5 terms or phrases in mind that best describe the domain you're seeking. Once you have this list, you can start pairing them or adding prefixes & suffixes to create good domain ideas

2. Choose domains with dot-com
If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, name recognition or branding, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're quite serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org is fine, owning the .com is critical.

3. Make type-friendly
If a domain name requires a lot of attention to type correctly, due to spelling, length or the use of un-memorable words or sounds, you've lost a good portion of your branding and marketing value.

4. Make it easy to remember
Remember that word-of-mouth and SERPs dominance marketing both rely on the ease with which the domain can be called to mind. You don't want to be the company with the terrific website that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can't remember the domain name.

5. Keep it short
Short names are easy to type and easy to remember. They also allow for more characters in the URL in the SERPs and a better fit on business cards and other offline media.

6. No hyphens and numbers
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type.

7. Avoid copyright infringement
This is a mistake that isn't made too often, but can kill a great domain and a great company when it does. Visit copyright.gov and search before you buy to be sure you're not infringing on anyone's copyright with your site's name.