Firstly you want to check the Letter amount! I think anything between
3-20 is great anything higher is just OK I mean ok if you had

elephanthippopotomous.com = 21 Chars is ok because its only two words! two words are easy enough to remember but most of the time theyre hard to spell, so stick between the 3-20 mark but ideally 15 letters or less you should go for.

I personally only go for .com's because they are the most recognised!

The best words to go for are ones that are searched for alot like "about" = about.com because if someone searches "about health and fitness" what do you think will appear at the top 3 search results?

Take a Look Click Me

Some good words for domains...
(if you have any short and sweet words pm me and if i think theyr good i will put them here, these are just a few examples!)

[i]-[want]-[have]-[about]-[hire]-[get]-[buy]-[learn]-[free]-[it]

also Maximum words in a domain should be 3/possibly 4, you really dont want to goto a website for example

iwanttogohome.com
but something like...
timetogo.com (is much better)
and
gohome.com (is much much better!)

-------

Numerals and Punctuation

Now for sure, ok if you want a Personal domain to have (1234567890) / (-) then its fine especially when its a (.co.uk/.us etc), but professional domains (.com) should be short and sweet without numerals and hyphens! theyre definatly a NO NO!

Well keep watching this space and im sure ill post some more after when i can think better

speak soon

pete!

Great Post Peter.

I develop web applications so I go for made up words. This way I can get 5 or 6 letter domain names that are prenouncible but don't mean anything.

An example (that I don't own) would be meebo.com

yes I know what you mean, I own

attoi.com (undeveloped at the moment)

but if you all know what a (googol & atto) is then you will understand why I have attoi.com

Google got their name from (googolplex) which is the largest number to man! this is a number related to something where they want to "give out" googolplexes amount of info AKA a search site!! THE Biggest search site! well thats enough, alittle bit of history for you their, as my domain goes an (atto) is much smaller BUT is still a reletivly large number! (i dont think in a million years i could build a database like googles, unless I had staff lol!) but an atto is a much applicable name for something like a directory or something lat produces lots of things (domains, products etc etc) so its for sale if anyone wants it unless I decide to develop it sooner!

speak soon pete

I like animal names in domains, I always picture a logo when registering a domain name. Animals are cool for logos, and very brandable.

very very good idea mike!

What about using domain hacks?

del.icio.us , web2.0awards.org, blo.gs

yeah i know what you mean

domain hacks are really good for portfolios however not too good for proffesional company unless its something like (oops cant think of a word ending in .com hehe)

so.com < best i could do,

but websites such as find.it play.it (it = italy) then yes they can be quite benificial however they wont appear on google or very rarely!

but i have one called dzine.it (design it, a portfolio domain) which sounds pretty good and has a very good brandable potential

dzine.it

i personally love it, short sweet and goes together and is for sale

good advice pete. thanks

I'm big on logos and pronounciation. If I can picture the corresponding graphic and make it sound good coming out of my mouth, I buy it

I usually go directly at the meaning of the word, so for example if I want a site about books I try to find the book genre and then maybe title or function of the site = booklist, or voteforbooks, rateourbooks (don't own any of these, just examples)

And I generally try to avoid names that begs for typos, like haveing the same letters alongside "tt" "rr" etc = hittowin, grasssource (that last one will get alot of typos and if you don't buy them all you will perhaps regret it if you build something really big and someone picks those typos and cashes in on your branding) Just look at all the myspace lookalikes out there

I'm a big fan of 4 letter pronounceable domains, but I have domains of all sorts of lengths. It all depends on what you are going to use the domain for, and if you need to have keywords in it.

some more words for you; cheap, discount, bargain.