When I started out with Aisling.net, I had just missed getting Aisling.com by a couple of months. (It’s currently owned through the year 2010.)

And, for awhile, I was well behind Aisling.com at Yahoo (which was the only popular search engine back then) if someone searched on my first name.

In May 2006, if you typed “Aisling” into Yahoo or Google, my website–Aisling.net–is the top website on the list, even ahead of Aisling.com. Since I stopped adding to that site daily, it can appear lower among the top five listings. (Moral of that story: If you want to secure and maintain a top listing at search engines, update often.)

From my experience with Aisling.net, a dot-net domain name can be just as good as a dot-com, but only after you’re established. Short term, the dot-com versions will always come out on top at the search engines.

But, don’t forget that you can get the hyphenated version of multi-word names as dot coms, when you’re buying domain names.

Until early in 2006, hyphenated names could rank as well as non-hyphenated names at Google. Then, Google (and some other search engines) moved hyphenated names lower in their rankings.

Obviously, with “Arts-Careers.com”, I’m using a hyphen. (ArtsCareers.com was taken.)

I’ve also used Fabric-Artist.com, for similar reasons.

However, I wouldn’t use any domain name with more than one hyphen; since mid-2006, when spammers grabbed a bunch of hyphenated names, that’s been a sure way to watch your search engine rankings plummet.

When I register my new domains, I usually use NameCheap.com. However, www.GoDaddy.com  is usually easiest for beginners.