SEO for Beginners: 3 Things You Need To take into Account when Choosing A Domain Name

As you may already know, using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques such as strong key words and writing good Meta descriptions will help ensure that your online business, web site or blog doesn’t get lost in the myriad of the million other sites. While these techniques can help your site stand out, another easy way to help you appear higher in page rankings is to carefully select the perfect domain name. While it may seem like this would be the easiest part of the process (and the most fun), contrary to popular belief it’s not something as simple as choosing a name for a new household pet-it can be rather difficult. That said, below are some things you should consider first before choosing a domain name.

3 Things To Consider when Choosing A Domain Name

1. Make Domain Correlate
In a perfect world you would simply use the name of your web site as the domain. But because there are so many different web sites and blogs floating around in cyberspace the likelihood of the domain name you want already being taken is very high. If this is the case, you want to come up with an alternative domain name that is still noticeably associated with your site so that readers and customers can easily recognize and find you—choosing something that is too unique or difficult will make it extremely hard for people to put two and two together and they won’t visit your site.  So formulate something “fitting.”

2. Be Careful when Getting Creative
While choosing something “fitting” is ideal that’s not to say that you still can’t get the domain name you want if it’s already taken—some people find ways to get around it. You can barter and try to purchase the domain from the original owner. You can tweak the spelling so that it’s a variant of the original. Or you can add a hyphen or an occasional dot between particular words. These options, however all have their downfalls: buying out a domain name can be ridiculously expensive, web surfers may never think to search for alternate spellings, and hyphens can actually do more damage than good—since search engines like Google know that spammers like to use hyphens (in addition to misspellings of domains) to lure those who may have originally typed too fast, you may get blacklisted. And if your site gets blacklisted, you’ll never get any views.

Related Reading:   6 SEO Mistakes to Avoid and 5 SEO Tips from Google

3. Fight to Get a Top Level Domain
Lastly, you want to really strive to get a domain that ends in a .com, especially if you own an online business and the prosperity of your business depends on the amount of trust your customers have in your site—.coms (aside from .orgs) are the most trusted.  Domains that end in .net or .biz might mean that you can get the domain name that you want, but they don’t really have the same power that a .com has—after all, almost instinctively a web surfer will look for a .com first, which means if someone else has the same domain you do but yours ends in a .net, the other webmaster that has the domain ending in .com will get all of your traffic.

Image Credit : absenter