Picking A Domain Name by Stephen Warren
In this short article I'll be discussing a few ways to pick domain names and
why picking the right one is vital to your success.
You may not realize it, but picking the right domain name can make or break
your website. You not only have to consider how easy it is for people to type
in, but you also have to think about how easy it is to remember and spell, and
most importantly, how well you'll rank in the search engines with that name.
Don't Replace Letters With Numbers:
Don't ever replace letters with numbers, this will only confuse people, and
will damage how well you rank in the search engines (I'll talk about how search
engines play their part later in this article). For example, this website is
called makeagreatsite.com, I could have replaced the letters "e a and t" with
an 8, to look like this makeagr8site.com. Although it might seem clever to do
this, it's actually quite the opposite. Remember, people will talk about your
site verbally (At least you want them to anyway), so if someone says "Hey I
found this amazing website called makeagreatsite.com" their friend will type in
makeagreatsite.com, they wont even think to use an 8. Therefore, you'll get far
less traffic (People) to your website than if you just spelt it correctly.
Use keywords:
Ok this section will be quite long because there is a lot to explain. The short
version is to put words that your visitor are likely to search for to find your
website, in your domain name. That sounds easy and it is, but ONLY if you know
where to start. Simply guess what your visitors are likely to search for is a
good start, but unlikely to get you much success.
I recommend you use overture's search term suggestion tool. What you do is type
in a word that is related to your site, so for this site it might be "website",
then it will come up with a large list of keywords that people typed into
search engines, relating to the keyword "website". Not only that, but it also
shows how many people typed in each specific keyword. More often than not, you
can't just use the top few keywords in the list as a domain name, they are
normally already taken. So you'll have to use your imagination.
Look at the top few keywords and copy and paste them into google, see how many
website's have that search term. If it comes up with more than 1 million
results, you're probably going to have a hard time competing with the other
sites to get to the top. If this is the case, try a few keywords down and see
what you come up with.
Use Geo-Targeted Keywords:
This sound complicated, but it's not at all. A geo-targeted keyword is a
keyword related to a specific area. For example london-repairs.com would be an
excellent example of a geo-targeted domain/keyword combination. If your
audience is global then you wont need to do this, but if you're only serving a
specific area, then Geo-Targeted is for you.
An even better example of a good domain name for the above would be
london-boiler-repairs.com if the website or business specialized in boiler
repairs. This is just to give you an idea of the possibilities, the more
specific you are, the better.
Don't Overuse Keywords:
It's very important that you don't overuse keywords in your domain name, for
example london-boiler-radiator-plumbing-electrical-repairs.com contains many
great keywords, but it's far too specific and very long to type in and probably
very difficult to remember. The shorter it is, the easier it is to remember and
type in, 4 words maximum, even that's pushing it a bit.
Make It Catchy:
That's about all you need to know for usability and keywords, now you need to
mix that all together and think of something catchy. For example, my site is
called makeagreatsite.com, it's descriptive and does exactly what it says, not
only that but it's got a few keywords in there too. It's hard to give advice on
being catchy as this will vary from industry to industry. It's probably a good
idea to get a notepad, write all your top keywords down, then right a bunch of
descriptive words and words related to your website. Then you can just randomly
pick a few words and see what you come up with.
About the Author
Stephen Warren is the creator of
http://www.makeagreatsite.com
Learn how to make a great site and turn it into a money making machine in no
time. This article is free to republish as long as it is republished in full
and the link back to MakeAGreatSite.com is clickable
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