Domain Name Research Basics

The ability to own a domain name for under $3 a year these days is absolutely incredible. I believe a website with a good domain name is like a piece of real estate on the net. In many cases I think it's even better. Can your house pay out thousands of dollars per year while it's growing in value? Years down the line when you sell a website it's not uncommon to get enough for a well established site to buy a decent house outright.

Selecting a good domain name takes balance and a lot of creativity. Tens of millions of domains are sold every year so it can be hard to find the domain name you want. The trick is to use your creativity to find a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to type but catches peoples attention.

In a nutshell those three things are what you're looking for. Some believe that having industry related keywords seperated by dashes in the domain name is the only way to go. This does depend on your preference and can help in some search engines. All I can say about it is for me it depends on the project.

If you're working on a page that won't rely too much on people coming back like maybe an affiliate page it can seem more acceptable to get a domain name like "industry-key-phrase-blah-blah-blah.biz". If your domains hyphenated with half a sentence of words and an oddball extension don't expect it to be worth much unless there's a very good website there.

If you're building a website for a professional business or an information rich page that aims at becoming a resource for people then get something catchy and relevant.  You never want to pick a domain name just for the search engines.

It's a general rule that the shorter your domain name is the more its worth. This may be in part because the shorter a domain name is the easier it is to remember or type. Dot com, dot org and dot net extensions are generally considered to be worth more than other domain name extensions. Excepting, of course, dot ed and dot gov extensions that are not open to general public.

Dot org extensions seem to carry some relevance for a couple of the search engines and also go well for free information sites. Build up a respected resource of information on a dot org domain name and maybe generate income through Adsense or donations or something.

Dot com and dot net domain names can sometimes just get traffic for being what people are looking for. Have you ever just typed in a URL into the navigation bar of your browser just to see what's there? If you find the right domain name you may get a bit of free traffic even with the search engines help!

I'll conclude by saying that if you are running a business and you have a catchy, relevant business name many times this is the best way to go for a domain name. Just take your business name and yank out the spaces and add dot com. Just make sure that when people look at your domain name they can tell what industry you're in or what your website is about.