How to choose the most profitable website domain name.

Opening a new website is a very complicated issue especially if you will be dependable on its success. There are many factors that have to be seriously considered even before registering website domain name which can seriously affect its ranking on the biggest search engines.

In most situations people name their websites on the organization owning it, but this might not be the most profitable solution, because search engines follow few very interesting rules that you might not know about.

In general all search engines favor websites which contain keyword rich domain name. For example if your website is offering web hosting services it is strongly suggested that you put the keywords "web hosting" in the domain name. This will help your website rank higher on the search engine rankings, but also there are few more parameters that you might consider.

Having easy to remember and "type-able" domain name is very important because this will help people memorize your website and later on become returning customers. We strongly advise that people should keep the length in the domain name in the 5 to 15 characters and one to three words that are also easy to remember. For example if you are a graphics design company you might consider the name GoGraphics instead of "williambellsgraphicsdesignstudio" or something else which is short and captures the eye.

Most search engines favor old domain names. Aged domain name is one that is registered few years ago, and in this case the older the better. Most of the times its quite better to purchase 5-6 year old domain name for $2,000-3,000 rather than registering brand new for $10-$15 . Aged domain names tend to rank quite higher, and most of them are already listed in web directories and indexed in search engines which can jumpstart your website incredibly. There is serious discussion about the so called search engine “sandbox” effect in which new websites are not listed in the top search engines results for some period between 6 to 8 months because they are simply new. In such situation having aged domain name can help you immediately rank higher and start making business. In overall it is quite advisable that you spend a bit more, but then you will cover those expenses quite quickly.

In my experience I had worked with both new and aged domain names and to tell you the truth the investment in aged domain name is the best possible case! Nowadays there are a lot of online domain name auctions where you can buy old and aged domain names on pretty reasonable price. Still there are some - the most generic products services – which are on quite unreasonable high prices. Recently the domain name aftermarket announced the selling of auto.com for the small price for $10 mill. This is simply crazy but I’m not the person to judge the buyers. In most scenarios the prices are between $200 and $2,000 USD which is quite acceptable and will be most definitely covered by the profits in sales in skipping the "sandbox" period.

For more discussions on this topic please visit the domains section of our seo forum here.