How to Pick Your Domain Name
Before you run off and create any website or blog, take some quality time to research the domain name.
You may want it to sound catchy, but it's wise to simply convey aspects of you or your business.
It helps dramatically with search engines if the words within the URL are related to search terms for someone looking for what you have to offer (e.g., solarbirdbath.com).
That would help a bunch if someone wanted a solar-powered birdbath with a fountain and heated water, and so they went searching online by typing the phrase "solar birdbath."
It's actually a term which gets typed into Google 22,200 times per month as of September of 2010. As for the plural of the phrase, "solar birdbaths," that only gets searched 1,900 times a month in comparison, or about 9% as much. Based on this data, it would be smarter to name your site solarbirdbath.com than solarbirdbaths.com.
How do I know? By using Google Keyword Tool External.
Keywords are essential for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to link your sites with certain words, terms and phrases. It's best to add keywords to every site, blog, article and location that has boxes for them: keywords that describe the content of what your site is about. And, as shown above, you can even figure out ways to include keywords in your domain name.
The first step is to visit Google Keyword Tool External.
While there you can input words/phrases individually or altogether and get valuable feedback on search term popularity and existing competition from other advertisers. By comparing each of your terms plus the synonyms, or similar ones Google automatically provides, it becomes clear which keywords should work the best over time. Ideally you can find some keywords that have low competition from other advertisers and high numbers of searches from users each month.
Additionally there's the concept of whether to use dashes, underscores or nothing to separate words in the URL.
For example, should the site be called solar-birdbath, solar_birdbath or simply solarbirdbath?
All of my research indicates that Google finds sites just fine in any case since they have such a complex algorithm with over 200 variables for detecting keywords.
In my opinion, this boils down to personal preference. In the end I like it this way, solar-birdbath because I believe it's the easiest to read. Remember; links often get highlighted and underlined, so underscores in a URL might be hard to see.
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