How To Choose a Domain Name

As time goes by it gets harder and harder to come up with a domain name that someone else hasn’t already thought of and registered before you. But from a SEO point of view, what is important to think about before choosing a domain name is what you can do to optimize it.

One of the best things you can do is include a word or two that are descriptive of your business. And since most of the short domain names are spoken for, you might as well include words that mean something to search engines. My website's domain name, for example, is “dianewestdesign.com.” So the “design” part of it is descriptive of my line of work. It might have even better if I had chosen dianewestwebdesign, or westweb-graphicdesign.

Another approach is to incorporate a word that “localizes” your domain name, i.e., webdesigneaglepoint.com. This is of value if your business is a local one—meaning that most of your customers are local, rather than national or international. Why? This is good is because it narrows the search results. If you were looking for a carpet cleaner you wouldn’t want to be presented with search results for companies in Minnesota if the carpet you want to clean is in southern Oregon. So naturally, you would want to search for “carpet cleaner Medford,” or whatever city would be appropriate for you.

Of course, this strategy applies not only to your website domain name but also to your site as a whole. Incorporating keywords— words that people looking for your kind of product or service are likely to use in their search— into page titles, page headings and the body content of your website will help search engines identify that your site has the information people are looking for.

If you are just now thinking about building a website for your business and haven't chosen your domain name yet, consider incorporating keywords in the name. You will be glad you did!

If you already have a site with a name that doesn't have keywords, do not despair. There are plenty of other places in your site content to use them to increase your site's searchability and ranking.