Domaining – the business of buying and reselling domain names had became flourishing industry for people that were able to acquire generic keywords for products and services the last few years. Since the dot Com boom in 1995, domains had become extremely important part of the internet industry mostly due to their significance in Search Engine Ranking and type-in value.
Even nowadays there is still large amount of people that type keywords and key phrases in their address bar instead of the search bar. When Internet Explorer or other browser receives such request, generally they are trying to open website containing those keywords in the domain name, starting with .com, .net .org until they find one or give up with Page Not Found error. These domains are called type-in domains and are extremely valuable since people visit those directly bypassing search engines and etc. Nowadays almost 99.9999% of those domains are already registered, but still new domains are being dug and resold for thousands. A good type-in domain costs from 1,000 to few million dollars.
Domains are the biggest definition of your website as they are the highest assurance for your websites are of interest or domain. For example the domain www.autos.com would most definitely lead us to the thought that it’s all about cars and automobiles rather than www.capelle.com which might be your company name. Also it’s well known that Search Engines are aware of this factor and they use it with high priority in their search engine ranking algorithms and therefore rank higher websites containing their particular keyword in the domain name.
Here I would like to stress the importance of a good domain name since this might help you boost up your ranking and bring you more traffic. In most cases I’m eager to accept domain names to be chosen with the services provided instead of company names and therefore help you perform/rank better for the services rather than the company name for which is pretty much worthless since if someone knows your company name it will be really easy to find you (you don’t have too many people competing in search engine optimization for your company name, but you have millions for your products and services and therefore single advantage might help you outrank all of them).
Almost in all situations you won’t be able to register generic type-in domain since most of them area already taken. In such situation you can used dashed domains, but its not advisable to use too many dashes. We’ve noticed that dashed domains rank quite well and sometimes even better than singleword domains, but that depends on your preferences. Almost make sure you put only one dash separating each word not two because that won’t help you much and most probably will make your domain pretty hard to type from customers/visitors if they remember it.
Its really smart to use as-short-as-possible domain name because if it’s short the chances of being remembered are greater and you want your visitors to remember and re-visit your website. For advertising purposes I’m always advising people to get short domains because this can help them advertise in radio and tv with the website .. aka visit mycars.com or whatever, rather than my-cars.com (my dash cars dot com). In this way brand-ability is quite important and you should really think quite a bit before buying your domain.