How to choose a domain name

Most people don’t think much about it but it’s very important that you pick a domain name that is attractive on two levels. These levels are:

1. Attractive to search engines that contain your most poweful keywords
2. Attractive to people that looks good, isn’t too lengthy and preferably doesn’t contain hyphens.

SEO friendly domain names

With that being said let’s look at “SEO friendly” domain names.

One of the greatest ways to get free traffic to your website is to optimize it for search engines.This way you are able to provide relevant and interesting content to a targeted audience which are all coming to your site with out you doing any promotion.

For a domain name to be SEO friendly it’s best if it has just letters. Hyphens are okay but not recommended as they are not appealing to human beings but we’ll get into that later.

Let’s say you have a site about how to train your dog. You want to take a look at a few keywords and see which ones you’d like to try and rank for. Keeping those keywords in mind, we want to have a domain name that contains at least one of those keywords and looks good to the human eye. Here’s an example:

Let’s say I have a dog training website that’s based out of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Coincidentally, a really good keyword that isn’t competitive is “vancouver dog trainers”. A great domain name to pick (if availible) would be www.vancouverdogtrainers.com.

Why would you want to do this though? It’s pretty simple actually. Google will give people “brownie points” to someone who has the keyword in the domain name. It’s just one of those things that is small but can increase your rankings quite significantly. If my main keyword that I was trying to rank for was “vancouver dog training” then I would achieve a higher ranking if that keyword phrase was in my domain name rather than if it wasn’t.

Bottom line is that you want to try and have your keyword or keyword phrase in your domain name (if possible). Ideally, you want it at the start of the domain rather than the end.

Human friendly domain names

Yes, there actually is such thing as a human friendlydomain name! It’s quite a simple thing to make a domain name human friendly but it’s often over looked in the pursuit of creating a SEO friendly domain name.

It’s quite important to prioritize making a domain name human friendly over making it SEO friendly. Reason being is that if you can persuade someone to view your site or sell the benefits of your product just in the meta description then it will ultimately get you more visitors. Here’s an example:

See how the meta description is selling you and persuading you to click on the page rather than filled with a list of keywords that a person will just skip over? You see if you can sell and persuade the person in the meta description they will be more inclined to click on your link and view your page.

The second area that you want to make human friendly is the domain itself.

To a search engine, having hyphens “-” in the domain name do not affect the keywords or the rankings at all but you do need to be careful with this one. If you have a sales website or a site that is selling a product I would never use hyphens because it is too awkward for a person to remember or tell their friends about it. You want to have a domain name that is alloneword so people can easily remember it and type it into their address bar if they want to check out your site.

There is an exception though, if you have a personal blog or any site that isn’t selling products than hyphens are completely okay. I’ve seen many people with blogs that are like: firstname-lastname.com. It’s quite normal to see this.

Third of all, it’s best to choose the most obvious domain.

For example, it’s better to have a domain name like speachmastery.com rather than riversidecommunicators.com. Make a list of the most obvious names that you can come up for your site and pick the one that contains your keywords and is the most obvious. If you can do that you have an ultimate domain name.

Remember, you have to think like one of your visitors. What would be the most appealing name for them to visit? Also, if you have a product that you’re selling try and make the domain name your product name. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Last but not least, keep it under 20 characters.

Domains that are over 20 characters long are simply too long and take too long to type out. Be unique and take some time out of your busy day to think of a shorter domain name that is appealing to people. It’s best to have a domain name that is short and catchy!

What’s next?

Check out how to pick your domain the right way using my Top 10 list of domain tools!

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