One topic among webmasters that barely gets any attention is naming websites. Of course, a website’s name is a small piece in the big picture.. But it can make the difference between a well-known site and a dead one. Or if nothing else, put your site on a solid platform from the beginning.

Deciding on a name for your new website is almost as difficult as deciding what kind of content you want to display. For some people it may be the hardest thing they have to do. Choosing a name is very important. If you choose the wrong name people may not want to come to your site because they may think it’s not worth visiting.

When you name your page one of the things you want to keep in mind is that people will not come visit your site if they think it is going to be boring or a waste of their time. If you give it a plain, ordinary name they will think to themselves “I’ve already seen pages like that one before so there’s no reason for me to visit this one”. You want a name that makes them think “I wonder what’s on this page” or “That sounds really interesting, I’d better go check it out, wouldn’t want to miss it”.

Why have a plain, ordinary name like Homepage of Adam Parkham when you can have a name like Jade Leaves or Daily Epiphany. These are name’s that make you wonder what is on the page and since curiosity is such a strong human trait you will naturally go there to find out.

Then there are the sites that have one word names like Google, Digg, and Ontora. Having a one word name will make your site more brandable. Consider Google - the term “google” is now included in the dictionary as a verb for performing a search on Google.

Also, don’t forget content. You want your website’s name to be identifiable with your content. However, I wouldn’t reccomend keyword-heavy domains such as cheap-search-engine-optimization.com. These have never proven to be effective and only give the impression of spam.

This brings me to my next point: make sure the domain name for your website is available. If you want your site’s name to be “All About Cars” then you would want allaboutcars.com not allaboutcars.ws or all-about-cars.com. As much as webmasters hate it, everyone naturally assumes a website to have a .com extension. If you decide to go with a secondary extension, you’d be better off including it in your website’s name. For example, ‘AllAboutCars.WS’ instead of just ‘All About Cars’.

Think about this next time you go to your page or create a new page. Is the name you picked exciting enough to bring in visitors or should you try harder to come up with a new one. The name of your site should tell the world “Here we are” not “I’m just another site so take me as I am.” You want to stand out in the large Internet crowd and be noticed. A name can be the most important thing you do for your site so make it a good one.