Are all the Good Domains Really Gone?

Posted by JohnCarcutt
November 30, 2005

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It’s a fact that every single 3 and 4 letter domain has been registered at one time or another. Many are for sale and many will never be sold. I actually bought one a few years ago just to say I owned one (2cy.com). I never even built a site on it. I had ideas of building one of those “how things work” type sites branded with “To See Why?” but real life didn’t give me the extra time.

I think many new businesses begin the planning process with a domain search. They know ahead of time the want to have a website for their business and would like it to reflect the name or products/services they will provide. This search is usually a heartbreaking experience. They of course had ideas of what the domain might be, but the odds are that domain was already spoken for. Many times even finding a domain related to the industry you are in can be a challenge.

Is it possible to find a good domain with out having to give thousands of dollars to a domain broker? Yes it is. The trick is to be persistent and to know your options. It will take some time and a few hours racking your brain to find names to check. But it is possible.

I recently decided I needed an SEO related domain. As you might guess this is a very crowded field and almost everyone in it is familiar with domains and their value. My work was cut out for me. Well my first step was to surf to my favorite domain tool www.whois.sc. One of the great things about this site is they have a tool named “Name Spinner” which will search for available domains based of keywords you supply. I knew SEO was going to be to broad a term, so I thought about my site and the market I was planning on reaching out to. My site will focus on coordinating SEO through out all aspects of a website, not just design or content. So I did a search on “Complete SEO” .. taken.

Now might be the time to note that when you are searching for new domains for a site ALWAYS try and get the dot com version of your name. The others may be available, but from a SEO and Marketing stand point there are many advantages to a dot com over the others. Choose something other than dot com only as a last resort.

Since I write mostly on SEO, I will mention one of the SEO advantages to a dot com domain. First off, the suffix of a domain has zero impact on placement in the search engines or on its indexability. The engines treat all suffixes the same. I guess this is not actually SEO specific, but one of the main technical advantages of a dot com over the others is type-in traffic. When a person types a keyword into a browser address bar, if your site domain is the same and a dot com, the odds are good that the browser will guess it is your site the surfer was looking for and take them to it. This does not usually work for non-dot com domains.

Back to my search for a domain… To consolidate my efforts, lets just say I spent a few hours and had numerous unfruitful ideas and in the end, I had to take a break. I kept using variations on my theme, taking parts of the words or just related words trying to find a combination that I likes and worked for my site. I had names like “Super SEO” “SEO Creator” and “All Optimization”, however I didn’t like any of these. I actually decided to stop for a bit and clear my head to see if a fresh approach would provide any different directions. So I hit the SOE boards and while I was helping to explain “LSI” to a member, I remembered that Google’s “LSI” imitative was kick started when the acquired a company called Applied Semantics a few years ago. It about hit me in the head … I rushed to check and there was, my new, never before registered, domain… “AppliedSEO.com”. It took me about 2 minutes to get to my GoDaddy account and register that domain.

Other options you can try when looking for that perfect domain include using hyphens between words or adding short words like “the” or “all” in front of your desired name.

“Yes Virginia, there are still good domains available.”