Everybody knows that a good, short and easy to remember domain name is worth a lot of money. The domain is the most important part of the website. Because the website is promoted and advertised through the domain, a lot of effort has been put into the selection of right domains. One consequence of this is that most popular words or word phrases are already registered.
Another trend in domain registration is to use the top level domain as part of the name. There are few very popular country domains like me (Montenegro), it (Italy), in (India), fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and many others. Therefore, if your desired domain name is “kiss me” you can simply register name kiss under the me top domain. Of course, many such names have already been registered. And there is one not so unimportant disadvantage of such domains. Since these top domains belong to individual countries it is assumed that the websites also belong to these countries. This is reflected through rankings in search engines. However, since such names are very easy to remember it is expected that most users will type them directly into browsers.
The latest approach in domain names is custom top domains. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that they will begin allowing for new custom top level domains. Of course, the price of such domain will be out of reach for ordinary users, but many large corporations will go for it. This way you could, at least theoretically, get rid of com, net, org and similar domains. But due to the number of existing links, these domains will probably last for very long. Because website rankings mainly depend on the number of links pointing to particular page, it makes no sense to abandon developed and respectable domains. We will have to wait to see how these domains will be used.
You’ve probably came to the situation where your preferred name is already registered with all general purpose top level domains. What are the options? You can either slightly modify you name by adding a word before or after your selected name or you can insert dashes between the words. While the last option is not popular because this technique is used by many spammers, the first option is supported by many registrars. When you encounter a registered domain they try to propose you some similar domains.
Anyway, choosing a domain name is not a simple task. This is true especially when you find out that most of popular names and their variations are already registered. But when you find a good name that is not registered yet you may just found a gold mine.