Saturday, March 14, 2009

Are You About to Choose Your Domain Name?

By Noah Chapman

The most important goal when choosing your domain name is to seduce visitors to have the desire to enter them in their browsers. It is like how book covers are to novels.

However, being unreasonably creative doesn't make for a good domain name either. Why? It's because if a domain name is creative but not keyword enhanced, search engine bots won't be able to index it in search engine listings. So, basically, your domain name must be both catchy yet search engine optimized.

Before choosing your domain name, you want to do some research on finding a search engine keyword that can be incorporated into your domain name. A keyword analyzer can assist you in this task. These can be found easily with a basic search engine query.

Using the keyword analyzer, simply enter one keyword or phrase that best explains your website. Then choose one of the keyword results that best describes the purpose of your website. By doing so, your domain name will become search engine optimized and be attractive to search engine bots.

Once you have chosen a specific keyword, you are ready to start selecting your actual domain name. Most domain name companies will tell you whether or not the domain name you've chosen is available. If it is not available, it will return a list of recommended domain names you can chose from. Take advantage of this tool by first entering your selected keyword.

If your keyword is not available as a domain name, take a look at the suggested domain names the domain name companies give you. If the main keyword is included in the suggested domain names and it ends with .com, consider taking it. Otherwise, you will have to be more creative.

For instance, you can use 'filler' words, numbers or phrases within your domain name and still include your chosen keyword. Fillers could be 'a,' 'an' or 'the.' You can also include fillers at the end of a phrase, such as '101'.

Search engines tend to not look at these words, so you still have a good shot at getting indexed while having a domain name that is attractive.

What if you looked at suggestions and tried using fillers and you still couldn't get .com? When a keyword is just that popular and you couldn't find .com, you should consider using other extensions such as .net, .biz, and .org. Although not as popular as .com, they still get noticed and is increasing in numbers.

Furthermore, if you don't mind international or local-based marketing, you can also consider using country or state-based extensions. It's better to rank in top ten of France's version of Google than to be number 100 or worse in America's version of Google.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment