• Section: Increase Traffic - Category: Domain Name
• Written by Sadain

You've probably seen domain names for sale for ridiculous amounts of money. Think those names will lead to surefire online success? Before you get tempted to buy one of those names, read this article.
One of the most interesting phenomena on the Internet is the selling of domain names. In some situations it could even be likened to an auction-based system. There was a time in the nineties that it reached ridiculous proportions, with several people becoming millionaires from selling domain names.
Why are these names so expensive? Who are the buyers? Does domain name selling actually backfire sometimes? In what situations has it paid off? A lot of these questions have no clear cut answers, as long as the world has rotated; people have bought and sold "everything," literally. Domain name selling would be consigned to a scam if it was examined closely.
Most of the names that go for extremely high prices (for this topic anything above a hundred dollars is considere

d extremely high) are domain names that contain key words that are in demand. Some of the domain names are actually category names. That's all very well and good so far. But when these practices favor the seller over the buyer, then something has gone wrong with the equation.
Most of my grumbling against domain name reselling stems from the view that, from a branding perspective, it is a failure. Quite a number of SEO proponents argue that having key words in the domain name is good (something I have never agreed with) but the real issue is, the name alone does not make good SEO. If it is good to have the key word in the domain name, why wasn't Monster simply called Job seekers?
I will be using as reference an excellent book by Al and Laura Ries, "The Eleven Immutable Laws of Internet Branding." Al Ries considers domain names so important that he uses up two of his eleven laws on how to name your web site. But why am I bothering to bash a totally "harmless" practice? First, because it seems to be catching on in SEO circles; and second, it will definitely add useless costs to the cost of domain name registration and hosting, making it relevant to any one who is thinking of buying that attractive domain name. By the end of this article, you should be able to go through the mental exercise of coming up with an original name of your own.
In branding the most important decision you can make is what to call your product, in this case your web site. This concept seems to have encouraged the buying of "key word rich" domain names. A good translation of the phrase "key word rich" is "generic." Your SEO expert and you webmaster will probably advise you to name a site which fits that description.
Sadly, most of these domain names are pretty awful; they lack imagination, and a lot of them just copy a description (common adjective) or a class (common noun) and turn it into a name (proper adjective or noun). Yet they are sold for ridiculously high prices; think www.desktop.com, www.mortgage.com, www.womenonline.com, www.seopro.com, www.etoys.com, and I am sure you think, what great names! Well, all failed in the first dot com bust; their names did not help them survive the changing tides.
In Alexa's current top ranking web sites, it will be interesting to note that there are no common adjective nor common noun website names (the kind of names that are most commonly sold). All websites that are listed as top sites are proper nouns. In any listing of top brands there are no generic brand names (common adjectives or common nouns), yet unsuspecting buyer after buyer is sucked into the mental trap that all it takes for a web site to achieve success is a generic name.
The lure of getting generic domain names is encouraged by some SEO practitioners and is also a product of the herd mentality; SEO "experts" in all their wisdom tout key word rich domain names as essential for high ranking in the SERPs. The key word effect is negated by the fact that hundreds of sites jump on the key word rich name b

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