Finding Your Best Domain Name

Written by Pathos

Friday, 26 September 2008

After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new Joomla 1.5 website to write some stuff about finding your best domain name.

First of all, did you do your homework on finding the richt keywords?
You will need them in this process, or not :-)

You see, there a two ways to go about this domain name searching, one is to incorporate your main keyword in the domain name, like -seo for instance.
The other one is to look for a domain name that is short and sweet and easily to remember.

Using Keywords in You domain name

Best option af course would be to have both… like joomlaseo.net which is short, easy to remember and contains the two main keywords Joomla and SEO.
Problem with this now would be that Joomla! is more protected than before and the use of Joomla in a domain name should be approved by the Joomla.org website.

This is just an example of how you need to think about using a brand name in your domain URL.
Amazon for instance and Google will contact your and start asking you to give that domain name to theme since they are the holders of this registered trademark.
So be careful if you want to do that, or get permissions first!

Better is to look for a domain name that is simple and gets the richt idea and stickiness to it, like alledia.com which is short, sounds good an is through its website contant now seen as one of the best sources for Joomla SEO.

As you can see, there is no Joomla and no SEO in the domain name itself, it is the content that works to boost its visitors and rankings in the SERPs.

Google doesn’t care much about domain names Yahoo and Live.com however still give you some points for having keywords in your domain.
I have a website about Network Documentation (I am an ICT Manager in my Daily work…) and it is ranking nr one in Live.com and nr three in Yahoo, just because of the domain name….

I check Google as well, but could not find it n the first 10 ! pages… so I need to do a lot of work there (its a Drupal site and I am still learning SEO for Drupal as I go along)

Did you also see the main competition? and yes, networkdocumenation.com was already taken so they have a head start on me.
For my own domain name, I had to do a re-inclusion request at Google, since it was a spam site before I got it.
So here is a tip: if you have found a nice domain name and it is free! (check that first with your hosting provider) go to www.archive.org and use the “Waybackmachine” tool to see if it was used before and how it looked like. That is how I found out why I couldn’t get it into Google at all in the first place.

Short and sweet Domain names

You could also do some brainstorming sessions to get spunky names or if you are trying to build a brand on the Internet use that brand name.
Like Alledia or Hummerbie as a simple example.

Just make sure the names are short and use a good keyword richt title for your website, since you now want people to use link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of you site to create a link. So for this Blog you could link to Joomla SEO Blog but you also could use that same link title to link to Joomla SEO Blog ;-)

Use your imagination and you will see how creative you really can be once you start throwing your ideas on a white-board or a piece of paper (electric ones work oké too).

if you want to go into the deep end and want tons of websites or if your customers aks you to help them, you could buy this book Killer Domains from Daily Blog Tips.

Domain Extensions

A short paragraph on domain extensions or tld’s , you know, the endings of a domain name?

There are a lot of them and it looks like there are going to be even more if al plans as expected.
The best ones for an international market are .com .net .org which are simply the bests tld’s.
But they could be taken and you need to venture out to other tld’s or choose an other name.

.info is not that good since some people think if you use that it is a spam site (I wonder why..)
You could also look at some foreign ones like .tv (expensive) or .it but those are just gadget like domains.
.mobi does work very well if you target mobile users.

What works best in extensions is to choose a tld that is locale to the market you want to target.
I use a .nl tld for my dutch web websites and that works great.

In conclusion: look at your competitors and what they use, look at your keywords list and be creative in finding that domain name that works for you!

P.s. If you have some great ideas on how to ease this process, don’t hesitate to throw them into the comments.

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