Your domain name must reflect what your site is all about even before they click on it.

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http://www.CreateAndMarketYourWebsite.com/Choose-a-Domain-Name/
The Future Web Owner’s Guide in Building a Website

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The tally shows most respondents prefer branded domains or a combination of branded and keyword, but many do not, and some believe the issue doesn’t even matter. So it’s all over the place. Lots of good points on all sides. Maybe you all are right.

Underneath it all, the consistent issue discussed here isn’t about naming domains. It’s about how to attract visitors and create a successful blog. How this can be accomplished, I would think, must be a combination of many, many factors, some of which are beyond any blogger’s control. I’m not sure a real strategy that works across the board could exist. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything to ceaselessly debate. I feel we do our best and some succeed and some fail, due to mistakes and/or just plain lucky or unlucky circumstances.

Another observation is what names people believe are “memorable” or not. Some of the “memorable” examples I’ve read above are domains that I would not remember. It must be a personal thing half of the time.

Given the fact that there is almost zero availability for keyword base domains with .com, would it be wise to choose one but with .info, .biz, etc.?

Are these kind of domains equally ranked in search engines?. I’m about to start a blog about cars and I can’t find a name that I like, so this option seems interesting to me.

What do you think?

Ginger
http://www.girlsjustwannahavefunds.com

I purposely researched & chose the new names with SEO in mind.

With a bit of creativity & planning, we can have a well branded and a keyword rich domain, both at the same time.

The indexing problem and comepetetion with good keywords is the problems that has to be overcomed.

buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-to-play-texas-holdem-and-watch-porn.com ;)

On a serious note,

1) My experience shows that *keywords in domain names can be the decisive ranking factor only when all other conditions are equal*, but this will hardly help if someone has done a better job than you optimizing their site on the whole. (like Peter Cooper said before re Technorati Top 100)

For example, compare results returned for query “SEO services” and “football ticket prices” (use intop20 for US IP). In the former case only 3 out of 10 top-ranking sites have the word ’seo’ in their domain (at least in Google), while in the latter case the 1st spot is taken by footballticketprices[dot]com in all the three SEs, and the site merely has any backlinks at all.

2) A brand name may also be preferable as nowadays finding a good domain with keywords may turn nearly impossible.
For example, when registering a domain for our link-building site, we found that not only linklink[dot]com was taken, but also linklinklink[dot]com, too!

It may also be a good idea to start with your primary keyword and than add some meaningless (or meaningful) suffix, preferably, a well-known one, like -moz, -tube, -ster, – ous, etc. Note (better not hyphenate words in your domain)

Like, for our domain, we made up that ‘LinkZaZa’ word eventually – just because it seemed to sound good – and then it turned out that ZaZa means plenty in some language.

Now we only need to make it rock :)

1) Is the name going to be so inspid or generic that you aren’t taken seriously? I think “buy.com” is an awful brand, I guess the “only” reason for their success is type-ins and subsequent SEO and content-building. Otherwise it’s desperately unmemorable, even if they ARE probably pretty successful (hey, what’s that got to do with anything!)

2) Does a “keyword-rich” domain name REALLY impact SEO that much? I mean, it is just one of a multitude of factors and once your site has good content, it is an irrelevance.

I’d prefer to build a strong brand every time.

masdhenk