Short domain names are often sought after because they are easier to remember and can be more visually appealing. In addition, short domain names may be more convenient to type, which can be beneficial for users who are trying to access a website. In this article we will be looking at how to find some great short domain names.
A memorable or easily typed domain name can be more easily brandable and result in more return business. The value in short domains also makes it a great investment to re-sell on.
However, it’s important to note that a short domain name alone is not a guarantee of success. It’s still important to choose a domain name that is relevant to your business or website and to use other SEO techniques to improve your search engine ranking.
Link shortening services such as bit.ly show that people like a shorter web address so, in some cases, the length of a URL could be a big consideration.
Aren’t all Short Domains taken?
While all 3 and 4 letter .com domains have been registered for a number of years now there are still lots of 5 letter .coms and even some 4 character domains (letters and numbers). Lots of these 4 character and 5 letter domains can still fetch a hefty premium, especially so if they are brandable.
With short domains easily fetching hundreds of dollars, and in some cases thousands, you would think they would be exceptionally hard to find but this is not really the case. With Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro, the process of creating a list of short domain and quickly checking the domains for availability is a simple task.
Let’s walk through the main steps for creating a list and checking all of the domains for availability.
Create your list of domains
First step is to open up Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro and, on the main page, click on the “Create List” button as shown below, this will open up the Domain List Creator.
Now we need to select our options for the domains to check.
For this example we will check a list of 5 letter .com domains so we will first need to set the number of characters to 5 and then check the Letters option and then Add to Pattern.
Now check the .com option and then click the Output to File button to choose the file to output this to. This is all illustrated exactly below.
If everything is copied exactly you should see a text file containing all of the domains that contain 5 characters that are only letters and based on the .com TLD, as per the image below.
It is important to keep in mind just how many domains you will be checking here. This job for example will output almost 12million domains, adding numbers to the domains will increase this figure to 60million domains. Only run these lists if you are willing to let them run for a long time.
Check Short Domains for Availability
Loading in the list of domains is a simple process of going to the Hunt From Websites tool in the Expired Domains tool section, setting Crawl Levels to 0 and opening the file by clicking Crawl Pages List.
This short gif shows the steps required to quickly setup a job to check the list of short domain names for availability.
If you follow the steps as in the gif above, DHG will first import the list and then start checking each domain in the list. Any available domains will be added to the domain list.
The process will continue on until the list is completed or the user stops it.
As you can see, finding short domain names is not difficult. If you were wanting to find even shorter domains you could try for 3 letters, or numbers or characters, and a 2 letter TLD. As some of the lesser known domain TLDs have far fewer domains registered than the bigger ones, it can be far easier to find shorter names to build your website around.
