Whenever you are deciding upon a domain name to use, whether it's for personal or business use, the first consideration needs to be the TLD (Top Level Domain). If you are targeting a global market, then a .com TLD is always your first, best choice. On the other hand, if you are targeting a very specific geographic audience, such as Greece, then a .gr TLD makes far more sense.

Because of the explosive growth of domain name registrations in the last few years, it's nearly impossible to obtain a decent "Short" domain name at a reasonable cost. However, that's really not as relevant today as it once was - short domain names were ideal years ago because they were typically entered into a web browser's address bar manually and you wanted people to easily remember your domain name.

Today, with Search Engines, Social Bookmarking and Favorite lists, it's really no longer a major concern. However, you should always opt for a name that most clearly describes what your website will be about. One of the nice things about the domain name system is that you can use hyphens in your names to separate words - a lot of webmasters still shun* doing this, so it's relatively easy to come up with an excellent, albeit longer, domain name that precisely targets what your website is all about.

* This is based on an "Urban Legend" in that it is widely, but mistakenly believed that search engines penalize hyphenated domain names.

Let's say that your website is going to be about your flower shop. You want to have the word flower in the domain name of course, but you'll find that all of the short domain names for flower are already taken. The solution is to be as creative as possible. For example, if my website were going to be about flowers in general, I might use:

little-shop-of-flowers.com - I don't so much care about the word "little" but shop and flowers form an excellent word pair for the search engines to index it on. Because I've used hyphens, they will also assign high relevance to both shop and flowers!

Now let's take it a step further with some planning and thinking about what flower topics we might focus on. We can use sub-domains to categorize specific areas of interest and plan to build them into our domain names. In this case I might try to register something like:

at-shop-of-flowers.com - on the surface that might look a little strange, but now look at what happens when we add a few sub-domains to it:
    roses.at-shop-of-flowers.com     carnations.at-shop-of-flowers.com     arrangements.at-shop-of-flowers.com
Now what we've accomplished is to create a memorable domain name that's going to be well-organized and thoroughly indexed by the search engines.

This particular technique was popularized with the launch of del.icio.us, which used a .us TLD, a seemingly nonsense SLD and a sub-domain completing the formation of the word “Delicious”.
Here's a tip - if you promote multiple product lines or services, you do not necessarily need to register multiple domains names. Instead, you can register a broad name, like digital-warehouse.com and then use sub-domains to create individual sites for each product line. This can save a fortune in registration and hosting fees, not to mention making management of these sites far easier for you.

The same basic idea applies to personal domains - these are excellent for blogs and other types of sites where you want to "Brand" your own name.

You should also take into consideration other common TLD's such as .net and .org if you want to control them in the future. For example, at Niche Mania we have:

www.niche-mania.com
www.niche-mania.net
www.niche-maniacs.com
www.nichemania.com

We do this because we want to control the value inherent in the branding of the Niche Mania name. We do not want others to exploit it, nor do we want to lose the benefit of type-in traffic we might receive from it.

Its worthwhile sitting down and carefully planning your domain name needs for each site before just grabbing the first one that's available. With a little creativity, you can develop a memorable system of naming that not only suites your business needs, but increases traffic to your doorstep!