Saturday, March 14, 2009

Do You Need Help on Choosing the Right Domain Names?

By Noah Chapman

Choosing the right domain names for your website are like how book covers are to novels. It should be creative and interesting enough for visitors to have desire to enter them in their browsers.

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.

You can reach these objectives by doing some research before choosing your domain name. You want to focus on finding popular search engine keyword that can be used within your domain name. There are many various keyword analyzers out there that can help you accomplish this task. Simply query them in the search engines.

With a keyword analyzer, enter in a keyword that best summarizes the purpose of your website. The keyword analyzer will return different versions of this keyword. From the list, choose one that best fit the nature of your website. This is because when it comes to search engine optimization, more specific keywords are better.

Now you are ready to start selecting your domain name. Most domain name companies will inform you on whether the domain name you've chosen is available or not. It will also give you a list of suggested domain names if your domain name is not available. You should take this to consideration.

If the keyword you've chosen is not available as a domain name, look through the suggested domain names the domain company gives you. If you can find a domain name that still has your main keyword and it still ends with .com, you might want to consider it. If not, you have to be more creative.

You can be more creative with your domain name and still use your keyword by using 'filler' words, numbers, or phrases. You can incorporate fillers such as 'a,' 'an' or 'the' before your keyword or number fillers at the end of the phrase.

The search engines tend to not look at fillers. By including fillers, your keyword is still present and you'll still have a good chance at getting indexed by the search engines while having a domain name that is memorable and catchy.

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.

Also, you could consider using country or state-based extensions depending on the nature of your website. It's better to be found in the first page of France's Google than to be found at page 20 of America's version of Google.

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