Oh Marcus! I have missed reading your responses in Q&A.

www.I-wanted-whitby-jet-but-this-was-all-that-was-left.com

Really made my morning! Thanks!

Only the new domain owner can assess the value of a domain name. Facebook just bought face.com for a reported $100 million dollars. Sex.com sold for $12 million dollars. 

The question you need to ask yourself...what is the value of this exact domain name to my business? Here are a few things to consider:

• .com domains are clearly the most dominant and powerful domain names. Many consumers make false assumptions such as "real" companies use .com. You should notice that you can choose the name of most major companies, add a .com to it and wind up on their site. McDonalds, facebook, google, sears, apple, citibank, etc.

• If you do not use a .com name, you can likely expect a percentage of potential visitors to wind up on the .com site while trying to find your site. If the .com site offers a competing product for a good price, the visitor may never make it to your site

• Even if you had a very small web business which generated $10k in sales per month, that is $120k/year. That alone can easily justify spending 1% of your first year's sales for a domain name.

It is most site owner's dream to obtain a perfect match .com name for their company. If you are on SEOmoz you clearly care about your site's performance. I frankly can't understand the slightest hesitancy at purchasing a $300 domain. If it was $3000 for a perfect match .com name, no hyphens, my advice would still be the same.

I agree with EGOL. When you purchase an unregistered domain name, it should be working for you in a matter of hours. If you purchase a domain from an individual or company, it takes time for the transfer to go through.

Hi Jason,

I am going to make a guess that you are proceeding under a false assumption. It seems you believe that Google will automatically weigh the H1 tag with a given weight and then you can place it anywhere on the page and it will keep that same weight. Please forgive me if I am mistaken.

Take a look at this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made. Rand shared as one of the biggest mistake he has made in the past was pushing clients to replace text in bold with header text.

With the above noted, I would suggest it is still a best practice to use header tags. Google has evolved and header tags is part of semantic markup which is a best practice. I would love to view some testing based on your suggested tactic, but I don't believe it would offer any value. Why?

• Content below the fold is valued less then content above the fold

• Content which requires users to perform extra actions to see such as click on tabs or buttons is likely valued less the content which displays without the need to perform extra actions.

In brief, you are attempting to manipulate the search engine results. There is no real value offered to the user with this technique. There are other approaches you can take which would offer value to users and be authentic. One possibility is to offer a "white business shirt" category page which shows your various products which meet that criteria

If you were to ask for the best possible SEO performance without consideration to other factors, then the 10 website approach, one for each ccTLD and hosting in its local country would be my recommendation.

Realistically speaking, a single .com address can be provided and you can target each individual country from the same domain with sub-folders i.e. mydomain.com/uk/. Some advantages of a single domain:

• certificates only need to be purchased once (i.e. Verisign, TRUSTe, etc) and they will apply to the entire site

• the site only has to be built once and not 10x

• maintenance of a single site is much easier then maintenance of 10 sites

• the hosting, domain acquisition costs, etc. are all preferable with one site

As long as your site is properly translated (i.e. human translation which is properly adjusted for each country) and the appropriate SEO adjustments are made, the site can compete. Keep in mind it is preferable to translate for countries, not languages. In other words, there is a difference between Spanish for Spain and Spanish for Mexico. Be sure to properly account for each country's individual dialect, currency, units of measurement, etc.

The ccTLD is one signal used by search engines to help determine relevancy. The hosting location is another. I lack experience with the .eu domain so I cannot comment on using that tactic. I feel the high costs and time requirements of producing 10 sites, hosting 10 sites, etc. outweigh the SEO advantages.

I find your words of wisdom both thoughtful and inspiring. Thanks for the generous feedback Hans.

I agree with all the thoughts shared so far but would suggest SEMrush as my preferred tool for keyword research.

When conducting research, it is important to clarify if you desire to rank in organic search or plan to use PPC advertising. Many of the tools, including SEMrush and the adwords tool Alan shared, define "competition" in terms of ads, not organic search. High competition means there are several bidders for PPC ads who are bidding close to the same amount. This information is completely unrelated to organic search.

Even tools which evaluate competitiveness for organic search can be highly inaccurate. For example, many tools will look at the current top 5 or 10 results and strictly grade based on PR / PA. There could be less relevant results from sites like Wikipedia or other heavy hitters which rank strongly for the query therefore showing it as highly competitive. By targeting your keyword usage you may be able to beat other sites on some keywords. To clarify, I am not recommending you try to ever compete head to head with Wikipedia, but there are ways to beat them in some spots.