April 14, 2012 in Blog, Search Engine Optimization by flip_seo

Choosing Search Optimized Domain Names

Choosing a good domain name for your business website can be very hard but it is also essential to get it right, after all you want it to work for you.  In this article I explore the many different aspects that you should be considering when deciding on a suitable domain name.  I also take you through the steps I follow when choosing an appropriate domain name for my websites.

All things considered what we are trying to achieve is a website domain name that adequately describes your product or service, is broad enough to allow for some growth and scope in product or service, is simple enough for a person to recall and contains your most important keywords/phrases.  From an Internet marketing perspective there are also considerations of company and product branding that may be brought into this specification.  From an SEO perspective it may be better to use an older or established domain name that has been registered and known by the search engines for over a while, these tend to be rated more highly by Google in a respect point of view.

In this article I shall cover choosing the best new domain name that you can without considering your individual marketing or brand requirements.

To do the following tasks I like to have a couple of browser windows open and a spreadsheet program.  It may be required that you signup and login to certain websites, but these are all well known and respectable websites and do this at your discretion.

1. Load up overture inventory keyword volume checker in your browser window.  Type in your product name or service and submit.  Copy the results across into your spreadsheet.

2. load WordTracker in your browser, either using the free trial account or if you have a normal account, login.  Now using the wizard type in the same product or service you type in the previous step.  Run through the wizard and again, highlight and copy your results across into a new space in the spreadsheet.

3. Load up Google Adwords in your browser.  Navigate to tools->keyword tool and type in the same keyword we used in the previous two steps.  Ensure use synonyms are checked.  Copy all words across into selected keywords and click estimate search traffic.  Copy all results into a new space on the spreadsheet.

4. Using the spreadsheet we should have three columns and what we are looking to do is this step is weed out all items that are unrelated or irrelevant by deleting them from the spreadsheet.

5. Sort the three lists by search volume.  Working from the top down, highlighting and copying to a 4th space in the spreadsheet the highest searched on and most relevant phrases.  Repeat these steps until you have the top 10-15 phrases and keywords.

6. Identify your target market.  Are you customers searching for your product in your local region or are they open to World wide suppliers?  Having identified this we should use this as the domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .com.au etc) in the next step

7. Using this basic list identified in step 5, you might be lucky and be in an industry with little or no competition, so what we do here is remove any white space in the phrases and input them directly into your favorite bulk domain name registering tool.  Check them all and see if we are lucky to find one of these is still available for registration.  If the highest searched on term you have identified is still available and this strongly relates to your product/service you should register it now.  If none of these terms is available then try using a dash (-) between words and also try adding words to the domain, like “the” or “buy” to get as close to the highest searched on term that you possibly can.  You can also try re-arranging the words in the sentence.

So, now you have your list of 10+ domain names for your website to choose from and you should feel quite confident that they are relevant to your product or service, contain highly search terms and are short in length.  If you are in debate over which one to choose then always go for relevant and high searched terms first.