(Most SEO friendly names, are pretty human friendly as well, and I know that search-term-in-domain is becoming ever less effective for ranking)<p>So I am working on a business/product and am not sure what direction it will take once I undertake my lean mean customer development process. I would like to have a domain name now, however, that I could use once I launch, which would hopefully boosted by pre-launch marketing activities done from this site.<p>How do you know when your domain name should be highly specific like: bingocardcreator.com VS. www.teach-nology.com (teach-nology.com ranks #4 for "bingo card creator")
FWIW in September 2012, Google launched an EMD (Exact Match Domain) update which Matt Cutts announced on Twitter [1] to combat "search-term-in-domain" results ranking higher than other websites because their domain matched the search term.<p>I personally believe that you should go for a name which is easy to pronounce/spell and if you can target your audience in the name than its perfect.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/251784203597910016" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/251784203597910016</a>
Why not both?. I like compound or blended names with one part of the name subtly telling what is about and the other part make it a brand (ex Photobucket, Pinterest etc)<p>Its easy to trademark such names too.
It depends how serious you are on the project. If you expect it to be something big and really successful, go with branding name. If it's a small side-project, go with the SEO domain name.