Domains are one of the most valuable assets that any business could own on the Internet because they have the ability to build a brand and also accumulate the power of links into them. Traffic is one of the most difficult things to build on the Internet, because more traffic is really more money, but when your domain converts itself into a brand you will be getting one of the most powerful ways of traffic: "Type-in Traffic" which is people typing directly your domain name into de address bar of their browser to get to your site.
The Power of Type-in Traffic
There are only 2 ways to get type in traffic. One is buying a generic domain with a lot of searches that will naturally get type-in traffic, for example: cars.com, vodka.com and such, but currently the high traffic domains based on type-in traffic are now all taken as they are very valuable. Recently, vodka.com was sold to a Russian company for 3 million dollars.
The other way you could get type-in traffic is being a brand. Domains like cocacola.com don't need much traffic generation to their websites because they are recognized by all people. While building a brand is very tough, this is not only one of the ways that you could be independent to an extent from Google or other website to generate traffic, but also one of the most profitable things you could for your website.
Carefully Select Your Domain
Many people select their domains based on keywords. If they want to rank for used cars in Minnesota, then try to register UsedCarsInMinnesota.com (the case doesn't matter on domains, I wrote it this way only to show the name better) in the hopes that they will have easier time ranking in Google for that key phrase because Google gives strong valuation to pages that have the exact match on the domains. While this could work for SEO, a name like that could be harder to turn into a brand because there are generic words and also because the name is long.
You could register two domains also, one for SEO and the other for branding pointing to the same space, but it is not a good strategy because Google dislikes duplicate content, so the best advice here is register the SEO domain and develop it like a blog to encourage comments, linking and other SEO stuff and register a good brandable name for your normal marketing activities, without taking care of technical stuff, because the brandable domain is not intended to rank for anything, just communicate the message you want.
The Owner Of The Domain
You should be the owner of your domain. As I told you above, the domain is the most important asset of your online business and you should take extreme measures to protect it. First of all, the administrative email from the domain should be one that you will always own, so avoid any email that is paid because if you leave the service, you will lose this point of contact with your domain. All the data you put for the domain should be real, because if you put false information you could lose the domain, this is especially true if you are hosting your domain with Godaddy.
Domains In Other Languages
In other languages, like Spanish, you will find sometimes letters like "ñ" or "á" which doesn't exist in English. The domain system was originally designed in English, so it is only recently that special characters are available to register, but take into account that most users are now trained to don't use special characters, so using them could harmful. Sometimes you would see gibberish when reading some Spanish posts. Recently I build a page about Comprar dominio.com and the gibberish is difficult to fix (is something about Wordpress and the language configuration of the database, but support can't fix this easily), so take into account this when hosting a domain in a host the offer a different language.
Conclusion
The right domain almost always is based on the brand you want to build and not always on keywords and second, take care of your domain because if you lose it, you will be losing one of the most important assets for your business.
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