Domain Names: A Rose by any other name is a Different Keyword.

Those who are new to online marketing will find themselves in need of a domain name on which to build their site.

They will also soon discover that the vast majority of their first choices are already registered. This is no coincidence. Any keyword-based domain name was taken long ago. This is most true of dotcom names. There may still be some opportunities with some of the other top level domain extensions such as .org, .net, .info, or .us, but generally, most of these will be taken as well for common keyword.ext or KeywordKeyword.ext combinations.

This leaves few choices. You could register a "brandable" name. There are plenty of success stories of well-known sites built on domain names which have no keyword value... or any other value prior to building a successful site on the name. Examples include YouTube.com, Google.com, ebay.com, digg.com, etc. However, just because they were successful does not mean you will be successful with a domain name you "made up" and registered for 7 bucks. There were other factors in their success... mainly that they each were among the best offerings in their niche combined with effective marketing & being in the right place at the right time.

Think of your domain name as real estate. Location matters in business & having a good one can give you a competitive edge in a number of important areas including brandability, authoritativeness, search engine optimization, & search engine marketing.

This may sound like I am leading into a recommendation for keyword.com names. That is not the case. In fact, in many cases, I would favor some of the other extensions over dotcom based on the acquisition cost of keyword.com names.

In example, I own consulting.us in my portfolio (not developed yet). I paid 3k for the name in 2006. Compare that to the name consulting.com which sold for 181k in 2005. The dotcom version will get more natural traffic as people are not accustomed to using dotus names... yet.

However, my acquisition cost for consulting.us was less than 2% of the cost of the same keyword in dotcom. In any "branding" campaigns, I would lose much less than 98% of that traffic to the dotcom if people 'forget' that it is a dotus extension as opposed to dotcom. To hazard a guess, it would be closer to 10%. So for 2% of the cost, I have a name with equal seo/sem keyword value & 90% of the brandability of the dotcom name. Ignoring natural type in traffic (I'll elaborate on why in another post), the dotus is a much better value for development.

So, one obvious choice would be to buy a keyword.ext domain for your new site. Another choice would be to lease one. There are more domain holders wishing to sell their names than there are wishing to lease a name. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post, but if you are fortunate enough to find the name you want available for lease, that can be a viable option. The benefits of leasing a name are similar to the benefits of leasing any other asset when your business is just starting out... Less risk, fixed cost, etc.

Try to think long term when choosing a domain name. A hyphenated name may be available today, but these tend to lose a LOT of traffic to the non-hypenated version. It would be better to look for a KeywordPLUS.ext or KeywordWEB.ext type of name. Shorter is usually better... but better still, would be to acquire a Keyword.ext name if it is at all possible.