If you’re reading this, you may be on the verge of setting up your very first website or you may be someone with a lot of experience who’s just wondering if there are any things you might have overlooked. Either way, I hope I will be able to give you a few things that I think are important when it comes to choosing the right domain for your new website. First, I assume you’ve already figured out the topic you’re going to be focused on, so I won’t go into anything that relates to finding a lucrative market online. The reason I assume this is because I’m assuming that your new site will have a business-related theme, just like your personal website with your family photos doesn’t need much thought when it comes to picking the domain name for that. Let’s get down to the things I think you’ll really benefit from.
It’s a well-known fact that the vast majority of traffic (visitors) to your site comes from search engines like google, yahoo and msn (which has just launched its new site called live). With this in mind, you’ll need to figure out the best way to rank your site in search engines in order to attract traffic. Most SEO experts agree that from your SEO point of view, keyword rich domain names can improve your site’s ranking more than if you don’t. For example, you might say that sites like Nike.com, Amazon.com and eBay.com don’t have keyword rich domain names, and you’d be correct. What’s different between you and these great sites is that they’ve got much larger advertising budgets than you have, so they can afford to have names that don’t make a lot of sense. If you’re on a tight budget, I suggest you go with the keyword rich approach.
Choosing a domain name with a lot of keywords doesn’t mean you’ll have to choose a name that no one will remember. But it doesn’t have to be that way either. Let’s say you’re going to start a site that sells pet toys and accessories. To do this, I’ll go to a site called: .WordTracker.com Sign up for a free trial at: .Once you receive the email from WordTracker, you’ll enter “pets” into the field. You’ll see that the keyword phrase “pet supplies” has a 90 day count of between 2,000 and 2,500 visitors. If you’d paid for the complete version of WordTracker (which I highly recommend), you’d see that for this keyword phrase, there are 145 people searching for it every day and there are 857 sites vying for the same phrase.
This is all good information and now you can use it to find a domain name which will tell your visitors what you do and also hold some of the most important keywords that you want to rank for in search engines. To do this, you can go to a site called: “ MULTIDOMAINCHECK.” On this site, you can enter domain names into the box and see if they’re available. For example, I have tested the domains of: “PettoysandSupplies.com” and “Pet-Toys-And-Supplies.com.” These domains are both available. This is great news because the domains names can help you get some of the high rankings you want.