Thinking of just randomly giving a name for a website you are planning to create? If so there is a high chance that your website will not come up in ranking in the search engines unless you have high quality contents and strong backlinks. There are a few factors that you would like to look into when trying to name a website.

Choose the right domain name for your website to improve visibility in search results. Naming your website properly has some impact on improving the rankings of your website. While naming your website is important another important factor is choosing the best domain for your website.

Relevant to the content of website:

Well that explains it all. Lets say that you are planning to set up a Sports website giving sport updates, news and so on. You now name the website which is irrelevant to the content of the site. Well the search engines will not care about this much but the net users will. I search for sport news and your website appears in the search with a domain name irrelevant to what I searched for. I would choose another website in the search having domain name relevant to what I searched for instead of your's. I would say 8 out of 10 users would do the same.

There is another advantage of having domain name relevant to your website content. Lets say that you are writing articles on SEO of websites and you have the word seo in your website name (eg. www.somenameseo.com). When someone searches for something related to seo then the search engines would give a higher preference to your website since you are having the term 'SEO' in your website domain name.

Check history:

One of the most important factor you have to look into is whether the domain name you are going to choose has been Black Listed already for any spam or any other activities. I had known many who registered a domain name for their website and later found out that it was black listed for spam activities.So be careful in registering a domain name or buying domain name from someone. Search engines penalize these black listed websites severely.

You can check the domain using Mxtoolbox

Length of website name:

The shorter the domain name of your website the better. One of the factor which determine the value of the website is the length of the domain name. Once you decide to sell a website, the length of the domain name is taken into account. So a website having a shorter domain name has a higher value. Here the domain comes into play as well(.com, .co, .edu, etc.). The length has no impact on ranking but is always good to see a short domain name instead of the long ones.