Who’s your (Go) Daddy? Confessions of a Domain Name Addict

Some people get hooked on playing Scrabulous (online Scrabble), others obsessively collect baseball caps… My habit? Hording domain names that I may never use but find hard to resist buying! I’m weaning myself off it now; I suggest you only buy names that will help make you money - and leave the cool-sounding words to someone else!

I got hooked working at an Internet publishing company whose owner got very rich, back around 2000, snapping up hundreds of thousands of URLs. The culture at that company encouraged domain name brainstorming and buying, as you can imagine!

I admit, I still love that breathless couple of seconds between when I type in my desired URL and hit Go, and when the search engine behind GoDaddy - one of the biggest registrars of domain names - delivers the verdict: Is Taken or Is Available!

“Available” comes in two flavors:

• Cheap: No one currently owns the domain; so it is for sale for $10/year or $20/two years.
• Expensive: The owner of the domain is interested in selling the name. That can run you from a few hundred dollars up to a million or more.

SEO and other rules of engagement for buying URLs

• Make sure your domain name is related to what you do as a business - ideally with at least one of your best keywords in the name. This will help your website move up in search engine rankings. (Don’t guess at your best keywords; hire an SEO expert.)
• Pick a name that is easy to remember to maximize word-of-mouth marketing.
• Buy the domain name for the maximum time permitted; Google likes to see that - it shows them you are in it for the long run.
• A one-word domain name is ideal, two words are super, three are OK if of those are short words and they suit your market, such as MySafeWork.com.
  
• Avoid having the same letter twice in a row; it makes the domain name hard to read and type in. (E.g. theelusivefish.com - apologies to my friend Rob Clark who runs this site).
• Don’t try to be clever at the expense of organic search practice. (E.g. www.2market2market.com. When’s the last time you replaced “to” with a numeral?)
• Leave the weird domain names or fads to those funky Web 2.0 sites that, as far as we can see, aren’t making any money for their owners. (E.g. Flickr, del.icio.us)
• If the domain that is your heart’s desire isn’t for sale right now, don’t despair. Keep an eye of the owner by visiting the “Who Is” database of Godaddy or whatever domain registrar you use, or a third-party “Who Is’ finder. You’ll find full information about the owner and when his/her domain ownership expires - so you can swoop in and grab it then, with any luck.

What’s in a name?, you wonder? A whole bunch, when it comes to search engine optimization. I.e. choosing the right domain name is another excellent way to Get Found Online.