After proper keyword research comes the domain name. The domain name is something like www.yoursite.com or www.yoursite.org. There are many factors that must be taken into consideration when choosing a domain name since this is a long term investment and "branding" of your product or services. This article assumes that you have read the keyword article and understand the importance of keyword selection and density. You can find the Importance of keywords for business here.

In the context of a business, the domain name is generally their business name. However, many other webmasters attempt to "park" good domains. Parking a domain means purchasing it and leaving it empty to resell at a much higher margin. The issue here is that domain names are limited meaning there will only be one www.yoursite.com and only one. Domain parkers provide no real social value or service and thus are excluded from search engines as much as possible. This raises several questions about the legality of domain parking. Many small companies and people cannot afford to pay the high prices for domain names that are parked. Even misspellings of domain names raise the issue. Some people cannot spell properly and thus enter the wrong spelling for say...Microsoft.com. Microsoft has sued and attacked many "cyber-squatters" for registering trademarked names in an attempt to get traffic and revenue by using those names(Mello, technewsworld).

Often, people entering the online market may find that their domain name is already taken. When people wish to search for the company's website online, they instead hit an ad website or something completely irrelevant. Potential customers and traffic had just been lost to a parker.

Picking a domain name can be tedious and very daunting. Almost every "good" domain out there has been taken. Competitive keywords like "Computer" would be taken thus "Computer.com" and "Computers.com" would be taken (Google Adword Keytool competitor search). Generally search engines view underscores ( _ ) as spaces thus having dashes for domain names are by convention. Generally having dashes and hyphens for domain names are accepted but are harder to pass by word of mouth. If someone were to walk around outside and talk to potential clients or to spread the word, saying something like "www dot my hyphen you know the dash dot com" is very difficult to imagine. The issue here is whether or not they know the hyphen and whether or not they can spell "shop" or "shoppe" properly.

Unfortunately the market out there for domain names is so competitive that almost any highly searched keyword or dictionary word is taken by commercial businesses and entrepreneurs. Hemanth Dondolu mentions that his friend in Vancouver owns Cellphones.com and makes roughly $10,000 a month. The site serves no real purpose and does not appear to be trendy however the SEO value of the site is so high that it doesn't matter. "Even a monkey can find it" says Hemanth. Any website that is about cellphones will use the keyword "cellphones". People do not require a search engine to type in "cellphones.com". The network that cellphones.com is in generates a nice sum of revenue. Even something as adult as porn.com sold for $9.5 million ... cash. (seoblackhat.com,news)

Good domain names are those that represent the company, possess a certain amount of keywords or those that are catchy. It is almost guaranteed that every single word in the dictionary that is marketable has been taken up and or parked. Top level domains span from .com to .ca and .org. These tend to be the most memorable by users and thus are the best(Hemanth Dondolu,interview). If for example an individual owned cellphones.ca instead of cellphones.com and advertised his cellphones.ca to someone he met, that person may later forget and automatically assume .com anyways. Keyword rich domains allow the webmaster to apply keyword density to his pages and match with the title. After choosing the proper domain, it is also a good idea to purchase domains similar to the primary domain(Wall,pg. 14). Things like making the domain plural or purchasing domains that have similar spelling like "colour" (Canadian spelling) and "color" (American spelling).

Many larger companies purchase highly popular domain names. Sex.com sold for $12 million dollars with equity(seoblackhat.com,news). Finding out how many links to a site and its popularity before purchasing the domain is common. Google ranks pages on a scale of 1-10 based on relevancy and importance(Rogers, Google) via page rank. So purchasing a website with a high page rank (PR) value means taking that traffic when there is a transition. A search engine like Google has a technology called spiders that crawl through pages it indexes and links on other pages to keep a cache or preview of that site in its files. To view the Page Rank of a page, simply download the google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. Having a high Page Rank means there are a lot of back links and visitors and is deemed worthwhile to purchase. Domain parkers try to register massive amounts of domain names that might potentially be good to sell. By parking one domain and selling it at $1000, the parker has the ability to purchase 1000/10=100 more domains and the cycle continues. All these domains become useless and "parked" with ads and other non valuable data. These parked domains which become a business venture for some and a nuisance to others serve no real purpose other than to purely make money.

Many smaller companies and entrepreneurs face the issue of law suits from bigger companies due to domain names. In a talk with Michael Fellows, owner of Flags International and FlagsInternational.com he mentions how several previous domains he owned were taken away due to law suits. Although he may have won some law suits, the cost of simply challenging the barrage of suits was much more costly than handing it over. At the time of this paper domain names only cost a mere $8-$10 per year(namecheap.com, godaddy.com). Michael owned theflagguys.com and flagsinternational.com both of which were handed over to his attackers. One of his competitors owned theflagguy.com but the added "s" siphoned a lot of traffic to Michael which did a similar thing. This makes the issue of whether or not domain names as trademarked names or freedom of speech resurface in a new light.