Here’s an interesting article on choosing the right domain name for your golf business from infragolf.com

Choosing the right domain name for your golf business can be a task very often characterized by frustrations mainly when the domain that you have been dreaming of happens to be already hosting an existing website. In this article we will try to give you some ideas, tips and tricks about what you should consider and what you should avoid during what can be a daunting task of setting up your online golf business.

The first domain names ideas that will come to your mind once you decide to set up the online part of your golf business will be to get the exact equivalent of your off line brand or company name or even a domain that reads exactly what your business is about; this is the ideal – if you are offering golf lessons to junior golfers, who wouldn’t dream of owning the domain name juniorgolflesson.com, easy to remember and spell out. Quite often the first attempt at searching to find out whether the desired domain is available will be your first of many to come frustating attempts. But the search has just started and you will have many opportunities to pick low hanging fruits that may come up during your subsequent attempts. If you find that the domain you are looking for is already taken, do not get discouraged, this is quite normal and happens to thousands of business owners searching for domain names to buy for their business everyday.

On the other hand it may also happen that the domain name you are looking for is available due to its uniqueness and that it is a name so difficult to guess that no one else has ever registered it before. You can then consider that you have found your holy grail of domain names.

So you are offering golf lessons for junior golfers at Myrtle Beach and you have decided that you should buy the domain name golflessonsforjuniorgolfersmyrtlebeach.com?Right away i would abandon the idea of typing this domain if ever it happens that you are spelling it to me on the phone. Spreading or sharing it through words of mouth can also prove difficult. I know, you would say that you could just copy the domain name from an email received or simply click on the link and bookmark the page.  On the other hand modern browsers provide suggestions while you start typing the first characters of a domain name in the address bar (only if you have visited the site previously) . These facilities should make life easier while dealing with long domain names.?One of the major problems with long domain names is that there are possibilities that they are wrongly typed when typed for the first time, thus your website is more exposed to abandonment. Another advantage with long domain names is that you can choose one that contains your main target keywords (we will come to seo friendly domain names later in this article).

We have all seen many websites with hyphens or numbers in their domain name, but i don’t remember having seen any website among the most popular websites on the internet having hyphens or digits in their domain names. If we take a look at the list of the Top 20 most visited websites for week ending 06/27/2009 as listed by Hitwise, we note that none of those popular websites have neither an hyphen nor a digit in their domain name. The big guys invest huge budget in website usability and its a good thing to learn from them. Hyphen and digits can really cause usability issues when spelled on the phone or while typing, so our recommendation would be if you could avoid them then avoid them altogether.

It is also true that hyphens stand as a seperator in urls, which can be good if you want to include several keywords in your domain name, if you decide to use hyphens though then use  them the least possible to minimize the usability related issues.
Keywords in golf domain names – seo friendliness

Having your main target keyword(s) in your domain name represents a very big advantage in a search engine optimization point of view. Having keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your website tends to improve your website ranking with respect to those keywords.

During a well planned link acquisition campaign, you will make sure that your main target keywords appear in the links that you are hunting for. Whether you are doing seo friendly directory submissions or link exchange requests, you carefully include your main keywords or variations thereof in your link request details to make sure that each link acquired that way brings the highest value possible to your seo campaign.

But what about links that are unsolicited. Will the link provider care about the anchor text? Most of the time no. So its here where the keywords in the domain name come into play, simply since having just the url pointing back to your website already provides the keywords in the anchor text.

Expired golf domain names & Domain age
Another way to discover valuable golf domain names is to subscribe to domain expiration alerts from a domain registrar. Many of the main domain registrar offer domain expiration alerts delivered by email based upon keywords that you add as filters. You can stumble upon highly valuable domain names this way. This is only useful if you have not yet chosen your business name or trade name. Network Solutions offers expirying domain alert delivered to your mail box on a daily basis.

One of the advantage of acquiring an expirying domain name is the domain age itself. Some search engines recognize the age of a domain from the time it was first registered.?You may be surprised to learn that our own domain name – infragolf.com – was already hosting a website that was selling golf equipment back in 2001 until 2003. (See the internet archive version of the first website here). We randomly acquired the domain name back in 2006 simply by buying it from a registrar without knowing that it has already been in used in the past. When we noticed the ease with which the website we put online was ranking well in the major search engines for our main target keywords (yes we did set up an seo campaign for the new website) , we decided to make some research and found through the Internet Archive that the domain has existed back in 2001. Basically when bought in 2006 the domain was already 5 yeards old.

The internet archives
The internet archive is a resource that can be of great help when you are researching on existing or expirying domain names. It can help you find out since when a domain has been activate. By determining the age of a domain you can evaluate whether you will be making a good investment in acquiring a given expirying domain name. The internet archive can trace websites back 1996.

Existing back links
The advantages of acquiring an expirying domain name are numerous. One of them is the fact that existing links pointing to that domain will still exist event after the domain has changed hands. The owners of the websites providing the backlinks do not often verify whether the websites to whom they are providing backlinks still exist, only in case of link exchanges automated software are used to ensure that backlinks are maintained. When a domain expires, the search engine normally removed all references to that domain from their index. But once re-acquired and reactivated, the search engine will pick the new website and will also pick up links pointing to that domain again.

You can use Yahoo SiteExplorer to find out existing backlinks to domains that have already expired.

Back Ordering Services
You can back order expirying domain names through back ordering services available on the web. Pool.com provides such a service where you only pay once a domain is successfully back ordered. You will usually pay a service fee plus the domain registration fee.

Country top level domain name
For those who are targeting specific regions or countries to market their products and/or servi
ces, there exist the facility of registering country specific domain names or country-code top-level  domain names to better enforce their regional or local online presence.

Some search engines who also hold registrar licence are believed to use domain name administrative contact(s) as a mean to determine the country specific target audience of an online business. Country specific version of a domain name may perform better in search engine rankings when searches are performed on that country specific version of the search engine.
A complete list of country-code top level domains (ccTLD) is available at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority website.

Conclusion
To wrap up this post we can conclude that there are several criteria that have to be taken into account when registering a domain name for your online golf business.?There are several do’s and dont’s and many tools and resources are available online to help you in the domain name selection process. These tools will help you determine whether a domain name has ever been registered in the past and the approximate age of the domain name. You will also be able to get an idea of the existing links pointing to that domain name and the link reputation value associated with those links.

Pay attention to the many good points about golf domains above and your golf marketing efforts will be that much easier!