What are the most important things you think of when buying a domain name? Do you worry about the cost? Or whether it reflects your brand style? While these things may seem important, getting the right domain name can be crucial to whether your site succeeds or fails.

If you want to fast track the progress of your site, buying an existing domain name that has been cached in google for a long time (before the year 2000 if possible) is a must. Google in particular is known to sandbox new sites for at least a few months, so having an older domain gives you the immediate benefit of bypassing this treatment. Not only can you start generating good rankings in google for your keyphrases; because your domain has age, it is likely to have built up some authority over the years. Google loves older domains, so if you can afford it, it is highly recommended that you purchase an aged domain name.

Perhaps the next thing you would look at, would be a keyword rich domain name. Unless you are particularly well know on the web, using a brand name on its own for your domain is unlikely to provide benefit in the long run. Instead try to include one or two keywords in your domain. All these example are good ideas for domain names if you are in the fashion industry:

• flashclothing.com
• highstreetbrands.com
• popularfashion.com
• welldressed.com

In contrast here are bad ideas for domain names:

• hopkins-shop.com
• kingfish.com

You might feel your brand is a strong one, but the benefit of using keywords to bolster the relevance of the domain name is critical. Leading on from one of the examples above, if you can avoid hyphens in your domain name, do so. If you can’t, try and limit it to just one.

Another concept to appreciate is domain names that run on. Take a look at the URLs below:

• spanishholidays.com/malaga-hotels
• spanishholidays.com/barcelona-swimming-pools

Spanish holidays is a great name to use as a domain name, not only for the keyword “spanish holidays”, but also for anything that follows the domain – “holidays malaga” and “holidays barcelona”. The advantage of having a good ‘leading’ word as the last word in your domain name is that it yields many more possible keyphrase combinations that you can rank for. As the URL of your page is one of the most heavily weighted factors in determining your web ranking, buying a domain that makes use of this concept is highly important.

If you know that you will be targeting visitors in a specific country, you might want to consider buy a domain that has a specific suffix. For example, if you are a butcher in London, it is unlikely that you will be trading outside of the UK. In which case, a domain name ending in .co.uk would be the most beneficial to your site. All other things being equal, google, would favour a UK specific website over a “.com” website for UK based searches and keyphrases.

When you have finally decided on the perfect domain name for your site, there is one more thing you can do to make the search engines love you. By registering your domain for as long as you can (e.g. 10 years) rather than the standard 1 or 2 years, you show the search engines that you are serious about the using the domain and that you are not a fly by night company.

Make sure you take your time and think carefully about how you choose your domain name – the success of your web venture may rely on the strength of you name.

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