Gerard,

>From what you say, the actaul Domain Name is irrelevent for people searching ... right ?

Not necessarily. These things change on the various search engines from time to time, as they figure out how people are "beating the system" by loading their keywords to rank higher.

For example, most search engines will use what they deem to be important information, such as the first < H1 > tag on a page, or the first paragraph of display text. Others use the meta-tags for "keywords" and "description", if present, and some completely ignore those. Some will index "ALT=" text on images, and some will even index non-displaying comments.

For some engines, a domain name containing your important keywords will help. Some will split up hyphenated domain names and index the individual parts, such as "rare-book-finder.com" (that name is available, BTW). :-)

All the more reason to find a few good up-to-date sites that keep you informed about these things, if you absolutely MUST hit the top ten on heavily-used keywords. Another strategy is to hit the top ten on lesser-used keywords and phrases that some of your target base will use. You might not get top ten on "books", but it would be rather easy to do that with "rare book search".