subject: How To Choose An Effective Domain Name [print this page] When registering a domain name it is important to consider key areas which we should identify when choosing our domain name. During this article we shall explore the key areas, and explain the crucial tasks needed when choosing an effective name.
The ultimate goal of any website is to attract visitors for various reasons commercial or recreational. However receiving traffic does not come over night, and requires an amount of search engine optimisation or SEO for short. SEO is the process of optimising a website with the intention of securing high page rankings on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This process should start at the very beginning, when choosing a domain name.
When choosing a domain name it is important to identify the following factors.
1. What Service or Product are you offering?
2. Which Geographical locations are you targeting?
3. What keywords will you target?
1 When thinking of your domain name try to include within the address what product or service you will be offering. For example if you started a website selling designer watches, try to include in your domain name the phrase designer watches. In theory you could have a domain name designerwatches.com or possibly buydesignerwatches.com.
2 The second factor to consider is where you will be selling your products. If you intend to sell only in the United Kingdom then try to obtain a domain with the .co.uk ending suffix, if offering your service worldwide then try for a.com and .de for Germany etc. If you are based in the UK and are intending to sell worldwide try to purchase both the .com & .co.uk suffixes for your domain name.
3 Keyword targeting is another important factor to keep in mind when buying a domain name, try to include keywords in your domain name again this will help with your search engine optimisation.
There are many tools available on the internet such as Market Samurai. This is a paid membership site with a free trial offered, however there are free tools available like Overture or Google's Keyword Tool, the latter being one of the best keyword research tools on the internet. All of these keyword tools are fairly simple to use and come complete with comprehensive help sections.
It is vitally important you find keywords that provide high traffic stats. These keywords if included within your domain name will help to improve your future page rank, for the search term, and reduce future SEO tasks and costs.
