What Domain is the Best Domain? - WEBlogs21 Education: One New Idea Every Day

Before you make any domain registrations and you make the first and most common mistake at online business, you should ask your self some questions.

• You have a business plan??
• In what ages you address to?
• What makes your business unique?
• What you want to sell?

Based on the answers that you gave above, the most suitable domain names for you can be totally different than you though. But lets see things in step by step.

Terrible domain names

Having keywords in the domain name is an important thing. Having too many keywords is horrible. Example of a domain like that is

www.buy-viagra-online-and-save-transportation.com

I agree. Keywords in domains are vital and many swear to them, but it can easily be done with short domain names that don't have dashes and are easy to remember.
First thing that you should consider is...

What domain LTD is good for me?

Depending on your targeted audience, most of the times a mistaken domain extension can throw you out of business. For example if you target for a specific country, you will probably be good by choosing that countries specific LTD (example .de). In fact, some region specific directories or search engines will only list your site if it is registered with that country's specific code. To make it worst, some search engines are favoring in ranking the domains that have the same extension and are hosted at the same location with the user that searched for the X keyword.

Example. A German person searches for "shopping bags" in Google and it first lists the sites with .de extension. After them the .com, .biz etc.

As search relevancy progress, localization will be more and more common from all search engines.
But if you want to buy your domain with your country extension, i would suggest to buy also the .com domain and use it as gateway or forwarding to regional domains that you bought.

Long or short URL?

If an address is very long, people will have a hard time to remember it. Example at hand is the "list or name 10 sites you remember". Probably most of them will be with 5 ~ 7 letters plus the extension (Google, Yahoo, eBay etc.)

Dashes or not?

Fact is that if you combine two words, most if not all of search engines can't separate them from your domain if they run together.
So the solution of dash used to work, but the name of domain and how many keywords it contains isn't an important factor any more.
Also, dashes in names are hardly memorized and visitors / shoppers will have a hard time to remember your address.
For what it counts, if you want my opinion on if you should use dashes or not, i would say don't.
Besides if you intend to fix a shop or whatever site that someone can find it only from search engines, its a suicide.

Having the basic covered lets see the next subject

Why to pick the X name

The best domain names are without question those that consist of one word (www.book.com). But a reason of buying a domain can vary. Lets see the most common ones and what is suggested.

Typo

These are the domains that are typed directly on the browser's URL. Example www.books.com or www.whatever.com
The best by order are

• One word with short length
• Two words with short length without dashes
• Two words with short length with dash

More than two words is not recommended.

Mistyped

If a domain has good traffic like Google.com chances are that mistyped domains also have equal traffic (less but quite enough) like Google.com. The mistyped domains can be very good for projecting advertisements, forwarding or parking.
However, using a mistyped domain for brands is highly unprofessional.

Multiple names

Often it worth to buy multiple names, even if you don't use them at all. By doing that, you can prevent competition on purchasing any misspelled or relevant name.
Example www.facebook.com and www.facebooks.com

Final words

As you see, choosing a domain is not that simple. Depending on reason and cause a domain can be catastrophic or a gold mine.
Before you buy one there are a lot of things to check, like is it memorable? Is it short? Does it describes my business or intention?An important factor to keep in mind is that a domain may be catastrophic even when its www.cars.com.If the previous owner used it for spam or pornographic reasons, you will have a very hard time to go up in search ranking, even if you will be listed in search results at all.
Also keep in mind that the most profitable domains are the branded ones. e-Bay for example does very good job so far without keywords and dashes.

I wish you luck and if a domain looks to good, double check to be sure.

Resources

The Web Designer's Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
The Never Cold Call Again Online Playbook: The Definitive Guide to Internet Marketing Success
The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff
Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing
Facebook Marketing For Dummies
Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web