Although this is not about Isulong SEOph, and it is also not 100% directly related to SEO, domains have always been a part of the interest of many SEO professionals. Since the main purpose of domains is was really making names for IP addresses to make them easy to remember. Thus the domain is like an extension of your brand name on your URL. And SEO, branding, SEM, general marketing, are all interconnected all under marketing. To help market a product or service and make a profit. Which brings interest to the SEO professional, not only because of the branding, but also with organic search result ranking with the help of keywords in domains.

But over in the next level of interest, are for the domainers. Domainers are the people that buy and sell domains on a regular basis. And just because of branding and usability where short domains are more convient to remember and type-in for people, some domain buyers are willing to buy domains for prices comparable to real estate.

Now, a new TLD name extension, .mobi will be official available for registration this September 26, 2006 which is intended for websites about mobile systems. Mobile phones, PDAs can go into this area as well as all other web-based services that can serve mobile content to these mobile devices.

This is like a land rush to many of the domainers out there. Many will be going out and targetting one-word .mobi domains and hopefully making a fortune out of them later on. Several companies are offering pre-registration already where you can pay for the domains in advanced to a domain registrar and on the start of September 26, 2006, they will go on and register the domain immediately. Although for a common word may have been pre-registered by several people on different domain registrars, pre-registration does not promise ownership. And if ever someone else beat you to a domain name of choice you have pre-registered, domain registrars will should be able to refund the fees you have paid for the pre-registration. I myself has spent $400 on Omnidomain.net‘s preregistration service already on the pre-registration of .mobi domain names. Some may say no other domain name extention beats the branding effect of the .com domain name. But the problem is, almost every common word domain name is already taken for the .com extension, and business that target the mobile market may prefer a short, easy to remember, branded .mobi domain name rather than getting a long domain name with dashes on a .com name extention. If you are a domainer and does not know yet about the .mobi TLD, better get your pre-registrations before September 26, 2006.