Saturday, August 2, 2008

Domains - Six Elements of a Great Generic Domain Name

By Smash Masterson


You don't have to be rocket scientist to see just how one domain name is worth millions and another one similar could be worth next to nothing. Let's take for example two similar domain names like Beds.com and , which are virtually the same but Beds.com is a goldmine whereas Bedsx.com probably loses money.

If you have already made the decision that you want to buy a domain then you will just have to read these 6 golden rules if you want your domain investment to reap benefits. There are a variety of ways to buy domains but with a bit of investigation you could end up with a big buck winning domain name when you decide to sell.

1. Keyword volume: Keyword research is step one for finding a good potential domain name. Popular keywords get traffic so check out your domain words on WordTracker or Google Adwords, so you can see just how popular your keywords are. There are several tools you can use; which may give differing results, but you will soon get the idea and you will feel confident in choosing the keywords that will result in good traffic.

2. Commonality: Uniqueness is not the only success factor in a great domain and if you think for a moment, domains are really all of one category. The best words to chose for a domain name are words that are always on the tip of our tongue and everybody else's. Word order and plurals are also important factors to take into consideration when choosing a domain name, for example - bank, banked, banks. SportCars.com for example won't be worth as much as SportsCars.com. Basically it ranks as a losing domain if you compare it to RunningShoes.com. If you try a couple of domain checks on Google you will find that ShoesRunning.com isn't even there.

3. True type-in traffic: You would normally have great difficulty in viewing this type of information before investing in a domain name. The principal concern is just how much type-in traffic the name receives, but this should not include visitors who get referred from search engines and links and these are not long term factors.

4. Length: Domain length is important. Shorter names are easier to spell and remember, and are far more likely to get visitors. All of these qualities increase the potential for branding, and can drive up valuations far beyond the reasonable, which is great if you are the one selling;)

5. Prior use: When you buy a name from a drop service or from an expired list it may appear to be perfect but you but you never now what dark history it may have. A domain under first impressions may even look good on Google ranking or PR, but that may not carry on to be so once you have taken it over. It could be about to or even already on the Google banned list and if that is the case you won't even get the best domain name back up to the top again. You will end up having to register a new domain name like carsblog.com and start from scratch again.

6. End user development potential: The one thing pretty much everyone in this business agrees on is a domain needs to be developable. In other words, you must always ask yourself this: Would I or anyone else be willing to spend money to put up a Web site on this name? If the answer is no, it will never truly be considered great.

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