The other day I stumbled upon an article which gave tips on how to choose a domain name and how important is the presence of keywords in the domain name or URLs. I just skimmed through it and here’s what I feel would be a good domain.

Short and keyword rich
If you have SEO in mind then a good domain name is very important for your business. First and foremost it should have your keyword. In addition, it should be short and easy to remember. Being in the SEO industry I can safely say that URL’s of pages and the anchor text of links linking to these pages play an important role in Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The presence of an appropriate keyword in the domain name will do no harm to your SEO campaign as most webmasters generate links by making use of the business name in the anchor text. This will make sure that your keyword is present in the anchor text as well as the URL.

Long may do
There may be a possibility that you don’t get a short domain name which incorporates your most general keyword. In this case a long domain name (not more than 3-4 words) can be considered. For example let us assume that you are an internet marketing service provider and you can’t get a domain by the name of internetmarketing.com. Here a domain name such as internetmarketingusa.com may also serve the purpose as it gives an idea of your business and geographical location.

Country TLD may be useful
These days major search engines like Google have separate sites for each country and they give importance to the sites which are hosted locally. In this case a country code top level domain would be ideal for a business owner who wants to target a select geographic location. Let’s say that you want to sell a certain product or service only in the UK then in that case a domain.co.uk would be best suited for you.

Some may argue that in choosing a domain name with keywords you compromise on the branding, but I feel that’s the risk worth taking because good conversions are more important than branding.

Tags: Internet Marketing, SEO, Web Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.