I keep running across the question of domain name selection so I thought I’d put in my 2 cents about what a good domain name is (and isn’t): Good domain names are memorable – domain names that cannot be easily remembered are easily forgotten Good domain names are .com – forget about .tv, .ws and all the rest of that junk… .com domain names are superior because Joe and Jane Q. Public think of the internet in terms of .com. If you go out and buy www.abc.tv and your competitor has www.abc.com, I’d bet the cup of coffee that I’m drinking that about half of your marketing efforts will wind up driving business to your competitor’s site. ‘Dot com’ may not have any technical differences like .edu or .gov, but it is huge in terms of ‘mind share’ Use keyword rich domain names – I know this sounds old skool, but there are two good reasons for this, one of which doesn’t get the notice that it deserves… Reason 1 – Many search engines do look at keywords in your domain and give them some weight. Sure there are companies that are hugely successful like Ebay and Amazon that don’t use keyword rich domains – I’m not saying that you can’t be successful without them, but I am saying that it can give you a leg up. Plus, most of us don’t have Ebay or Amazon’s marketing budgets. Reason 2 – this is the important one… Keyword rich domain names increase the likelihood that the anchor text of your inbound links will be keyword rich, which makes those links significantly more valuable for SEO purposes. The problem with link requests or unsolicited links is that you really have no control over how people link to you. I usually ‘suggest’ what the anchor text and following line of text should look like, but the truth is the webmaster can put in anything that he or she wants. Many people are busy, ill informed or lazy, and they are very likely to simply use your domain name as the all important anchor text. Now if your domain name is keyword rich, then you are doing just fine thank you very much… But if your domain text is keyword poor then the value of these inbound links is likely to be diminished… Anyways, it’s worth thinking about. Best wishes, Ian C
Point #2 is bang on. It's one of the reasons I somewhat regret one of my domain names, and am happier with one of my others that a registered a year later after understanding the importance of link text. Live and learn!
Those who have big marketing budgets can afford to get less keyword-rich domains (especially if their desired keyword-rich choices are owned by someone else) to build up the brand. People usually associate a brand with having a web site that has a dotcom on its end so if Ebay is popular, I think conventional wisdom will tell me I should be able to view its contents on ebay.com instead of ebay.ws or ebay.tv. Point 2 is a good one. Yes, though we can't dictate people what anchor text to use, but it's more likely they will use the keywords found in the domain name as anchor links than on those that don't have keyword-rich domain names.