What's in a name? Everything. Your domain name is like the hanging sign over your door, it must be clear concise and memorable.
Most of the traffic to your site will be from search engines, so it's important to include the name of your business and a top keyword in your domain name. A business called Jack City used cars, could use a domain name like www.jackcitycars.com, were jack city is the name of the business and the keyword is cars. Sometimes your chosen domain name is not available. In that case you can try adding a hyphen ie. www.jack-city-cars.com or www.jackcity-cars.com .
Using the hyphen is a double edged sword, your site rank higher in the search engines, but people typing the name into their address bar will likely misspell it; ending up at your competitors site.
If your business is regional, a region specific top level domain name, such as .ca (Canada) .co.uk (United kingdom), may be a good choice for you. If you plan to do international business .com really is the best choice.
Don't try and cut corners and host your site at a free hosting site. Having a domain name like http://yoursite.freehostingsite.com looks unprofessional. I mean really, what does it say about your business if you can't afford the 50 bucks a year it costs to get your own exclusive domain name.
Having your own domain name will also give you a professional looking email address like yourname@yoursite.com . Using a hotmail or yahoo email address looks like a scam and will scare away customers.
If you have the money you may want to consider buying variations and common misspellings of your domain name. This is a fairly inexpensive way to boost traffic to your site.
As you can see a domain name is very important and should be chosen with care. Changing it later will cost you vast amounts of your hard earned traffic.
