If your company has a distinctive name that you use in your marketing campaigns, and if your company is well known among your customers it might be best to try and register your company name as your domain name. For example, it will be better for Standardbank to try and register standardbank.co.za as opposed to bankingservices.co.za

But if your company does not have such a strongly branded presence in the market, or if you are offering a product or service that you specifically want to market through the internet without even HAVING a company, then a descriptive name might be a better option (e.g. www.health-products.co.za)

Hyphens are easier to read in print, are easier to 'understand' by the search engines (remember that a key linking strategy is to have text links contain your targeted keywords. If your domain name is legible to search engines and it is used to link to your site, you score some points since your keywords are already contained in your domain name), and gives you more choice. The negatives about hyphens is that they are difficult for people to hear! You will probably have difficulty in spelling out your domain name over the phone or in conversation when it contains hyphens. The best strategy as far as I am concerned is to register both the name without hyphens as well as the one with hyphens, and in fact this is what I do for practically all my sites. I then use the name with hyphens as the actual site and use the name without the hyphens to communicate verbally about the site. You can easily put a redirect on the one domain name to forward to the other.

The other difficult decision to make is whether to register a .com or a .co.za. My advice on this is to register a .com if you are primarily going to focus on marketing your products and services internationally and to register a .co.za if you are primarily going to market locally. Please note that lots of search engines (for example Google and MSN) nowadays offer the facility to search locally ('Pages from South Africa'). Trust me, if you are a locally based business only planning on using your internet site to locally market your business you are MUCH better off having a .co.za site than a .com. The other advantage of using a .co.za is that there is much more scope for coming up with a name that contains your keywords than with a .com. Trying to register a .com with ANY popular type of word in the domain is almost impossible these days.