People often ask “How important is a domain name?” The answer to that is a tough one. So I’m going to break it into sections so you can apply it to what you are interested in the domain for.
SEO Website
A google search can return many bad domains, along with some really great domains. Take a look at the content on those pages. The good domain could get away with poor content and optimization, and still rank OK, while the bad domain (not necessarily bad, but it doesn’t contain the keywords) is likely ranking because the website is well planned out with good content and optimization.
PPC Landing Page
If all you’re going to do is have a single page where you will send PPC traffic to, the domain could be a bit more important. People look at that along with your ads title and description. If you are selling car parts, and your domain is sugarkisses.com, you can sugar kiss that potential customer good bye. Try to get something that says “car parts”. Unless you have a bank roll, don’t expect to go and register carparts.com, but you could possibly register carpartnation.com, or carpartalley.com.
Buzz or Brand Website
What I mean by Buzz or Brand website, is that it’s a site that is something that people will talk about, or write an article about. For that, any domain would work, if it’s catchy. When the guys at Google decided to build a little search engine, they probably would have loved to get the domain search.com, or searchengine.com, but those had long been registered. They then picked a word that was related to what they were trying to do, and then changed it a bit to get a name that was available. Now that’s a brand.
In summary, the importance of the domain really depends on what it is you plan to do with it. There are probably more bad domains out there making money than there are good domains, and I bet you can rattle off 20 domains that don’t mean anything either.