Saturday, March 14, 2009

Do You Need Help on Choosing the Right Domain Names?

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.

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.

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 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.

But what if you couldn't get .com using your specific keyword? Well, sometimes it is better to stick with lesser-used extension because the keyword is just so popular. Extensions that still get noticed include .net, .biz and .org.

You could also consider using country ot state-based extensions if you don't mind international or local-based marketing. It is better to rank number one in France's version of google than to be number 200 or worse in America's version of Google.

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