So many thoughts on what makes a website successful. But when
planning, most people spend too much time on stuff that does not
matter. You have got to free your mind from what you think is
the status quo. There are many myths that doom you to failure.

So many people coming to this forum seem to think that domain
picking is worth spending sleepless nights trying to figure out.
It should not be that hard. Spending time picking a domain name
is just not what you should be stressing out on. You should be
concentrating on content and being visitor friendly on all levels.

I think too much emphasis is placed on domains and many people
end up not believing they failed. They think they followed some list
and boom, success should be there. It seems that having some
long tail keyword domain is the #1 thing to do. It's not.

I thought I would give my take on picking domain names. A lot of people
put way too much thought into this instead of real SEO. These are just
my opinions, but looking at the big boys of websites, they seem to follow
these rules.

Your domain should stick in people's minds.

Easy to spell, easy to say.

The shorter the better.

Avoid plurals. (see #2)

Avoid putting a string of keywords together in a domain. One is enough, if at all.

Think about all the big sites you can name. Then think why they picked those names.
Then think why you are spending time doing something different. Here's some of
the ones that come to my mind: facebook, google, zillow, monster, amazon, ebay,
twitter, zoosk, kayak, myspace, squidoo, wikipedia, yelp, youtube, sohu, live, etc.

In fact, you may wish to check out the top most visited websites and their
domains: Top 1000 sites -

Google is changing. If you want your site to have staying power, worry about what
google really cares about.

Paul