If you’re starting a web presence from scratch, there’s a significant chance you’re about to waste $5,000.

Many businesses are keen on the concept of the “premium” domain name– in particular, short, generic names. Why not be “loan.com” instead of “SmithMortgageCompany.com”, or “roses.com” for your nursery? Even long after the domain market peaked with the multi-million dollar sales of names like business.com, people are still paying four, five, and six figure prices for attractive sounding names.

The problem is, like many Internet-based profit plans, it’s based on dated logic.

The keyword-domain business model seems to be designed around the old layout of browsers. On Internet Explorer 6 and below, there is no “search” box by default, so there was hope someone would type “Used Toyota” in the address box instead, and arrive at usedtoyota.com.

However, newer browsers not only provide a prominent search box, but in some cases, it’s the dominant navigation system. Consider Google Chrome’s “unified” box which offers search as a prominent option for any text enterred, or almost any modern browser redirecting a faulty URL to your preferred search engine.

In either case, odds are, users are going to end up at a search engine, not at your very expensive keyword.com name, so you end up no further ahead than if you had a low-value name.

Okay, still not convinced? Fair enough. I know a lot of people find a strong marketing appeal in being able to say “we’re keyword.com”. However, in most cases, that won’t work with your branding. If you’ve built any sort of off-line presence, people are likely going to search for the brand they know offline, not some cute name you’ve chosen online. An interesting example: the computer-parts manufacturer Unicomp put their online presence behind pckeyboard.com, instead of unicomp.com; with just a parking page at the latter domain, it’s actually damaging their brand. Customers may give up and assume they’re out of business if their own brand name doesn’t resolve.

The other huge risk of a domain-centric web presence is the lack of retargetability. Look ahead a few years. You built a famous brand at companya.com. Then you merge and have to re-brand as companyb.com. While it may be trivial to redirect the traffic, it’s now a problematic business aspect– you’re forever having to service the old name, or forced to make comical and expensive “We’ve changed our name” marketing messages instead of “Buy our products” ones.

If you had built around search business, instead of a branded name, traffic will follow the redirect naturally. Your customers, may, in the end, never really think of your domain name- or possibly even your brand itself. In general, they’re more looking for the site they remember, or the offer they remember, from searches.

It may sound a bit fragile. After all, a domain is a “bought” thing– generally difficult to dislodge– so it’s a more “solid base” for a company’s presence. However, an impressive presence doesn’t correlate to impressive sales. Just consider where you shop: Amazon did fairly well selling books considering its biggest competitor owns books.com (which they don’t even use in any significant marketing). Newegg.com does very well considering they don’t have computers.com. Travel.com draws less than 10% of the volume of Expedia or Orbitz.

Don’t eschew the keyword-domain concept as a whole, however. Having the extra keywords can help your pages rank. However, widgets.com at $200,000 isn’t necessary for it. “AcmeWidgetFirm.com” will do pretty well too, for $10. It’s all only a small piece of a bigger task– one of SEO and overall selling, not merely hoping to be the first place clumsy typists land.