How To Choose a Domain Name

If you've been on the Internet for any amount of time you will have seen domain names perhaps without even realizing it. Every website must have a domain name for Internet users to be able to find the site amongst the billions of others, for instance, eBay.com or Facebook.com are examples of domain names. See diagram below as to what the different parts mean.

Let's consider an example say you have a website about motorcycles. A searcher interested in motorcycles might type in the keyword motorcycle into Google. The best domain name that you could possibly have would be just containing the word motorcycle, so motorcycle.com. That domain name has a keyword density of 100% and it is also a.com. A .com is recognized as being the very best domain extension to own.

To demonstrate this let's look at that exact search on Google.



So as you can see using the exact word or words in the domain name is better than even a popular brand as in the example. Other things do play a part, but if you have the exact match domain you have a bonus over everyone else no matter how big a brand they are!

Now obviously that domain name motorcycle.com has already been taken. So what alternatives do you have? We'll there are other extensions to try, such as the following:

Motorcycle.net
motorcycle.org
motorcycle.co.uk (this is a country specific name)

These all use the same keywords but have a different extension. Perhaps the most important extensions if the.com is not available are the.net and .org. If your website is targeted to one specific country then you should try to get the country specific domain name. For instance, in our example above motorcycle.co.uk would really only be relevant to the United Kingdom.

Take into account that this is only an example there is zero chance of these keywords being available due to their popularity, someone got there first sorry!

To easily check if a domain is available you can go here:

http://www.namecheap.com/domain-name-search.asp

It will list the most popular domain extensions and their availability for the keywords that you enter.

There are two options the first in order of importance is to consider a phrase matched domain. You can come up with a phrase match by adding a prefix or a suffix to the keywords. So continuing our example of motorcycle here are some possibilities:

• First using a suffix


• motorcycleworld.com


• Next using a prefix


• Yourmotorcycle.com

Now we get to the good bit where you can actually go and buy your domain name. You have two options here. If you don't have a hosting account then the best way to get your first domain name is to buy your hosting at the same time as registering a domain name. The reason for this is that very often the domain comes free at the time of getting a hosting package. You would need to check first though as this isn't always the case.

If you already have a hosting account then you can go to a website like namecheap.com or Moniker.com. On those sites you'll be able to simply search for the domain's availability and register it.

Here is an example on Namecheap:
http://www.namecheap.com/domain-name-search.asp



In summary, we have taken a comprehensive look at what the domain name is and what words it should contain and perhaps more importantly those that it shouldn't, along with an example, followed by the options you have for buying a domain name. So there you have it, you should now be able to confidently go out and buy your first domain name that is SEO friendly giving you the best option for getting ranked highly on your chosen keywords in the search engines.