[mootothemax]

One aspect I'm interested in is the SEO angle. For instance, if I make cow food and call myself Cow Food Online, register a domain of cowfoodonline.com, would I stand to benefit from having lots of links with "Cow Food Online" pointing at my domain, since that'd be the name of my service?

[patio11]

You will benefit from both that factor and the exact match domain (EMD) bonus. Basically, example.org requires less links and less aligned anchor text to rank for the query [example] than any domain other than example.{com,net,org}

Now hypothetically assuming I was doing cow food online, I might make my domain cowfood .com and brand it as "Cow Food Online." That way you get a bonus when people search for [cow food], which is likely to be orders of magnitude more than [cow food online].

[terrellm]

If you make "cow food", you probably want CattleFeed.com instead of CowFood.com or CowFoodOnline.com. A cow is a female bovine while cattle is one or more bovines of any gender. Not being picky... I'm a HN'er who makes his living writing software and running e-commerce stores for the cattle industry :D

As patio mentioned, there is the exact match bonus where your domain (com/net/org) matches the query exactly. Also, an exact match domain tends to lead to anchor text (inbound links) with the keyword. So the one-two punch of an EMD (exact match domain + keyword-rich anchor text) is extremely helpful.

One word of caution with EMDs... I bought an EMD CattleTags.com for an e-commerce store and have had to work on my branding to encourage people to link to me as "Cattle Tags Online" or "Cattle Tags Store" rather than "CattleTags.com" which isn't as desirable.

[rmc]

If you make "cow food", you probably want CattleFeed.com instead of CowFood.com or CowFoodOnline.com. A cow is a female bovine while cattle is one or more bovines of any gender.

In short part of SEO is knowing what your customers are searching for, and targeting that.

[prpon]

I ain't no SEO expert but patio11 who is an expert mentioned it as the reason for picking 'appointmentreminder.org' for his project.