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Deciding on a Domain Name
Before you run off and create any website or blog, take some quality time (as in hours or even days) to think about and research the domain name you'd like. It should be catchy while conveying some aspects of you, your book or your business. It will also help dramatically with search engines if the words within the URL domain name are related to any possible internet search terms for someone looking for what you have to offer (e.g., solarbirdbath.webs.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 searches 9,900 times per month (Jan 2011). As for the plural of the phrase, "solar birdbaths," that only gets searched 4,400 times a month in comparison or about 43% as much. Based on this data, it would be smarter to name your site solarbirdbath.webs.com than solarbirdbaths.webs.com. Surprisingly, the "s" at the end makes a difference with search engines.
So homework is mandatory to discover which terms and phrases related to your website title will be searched the most and how much competition from other advertisers exists already. How did I come up with those statistics and how will you do similar research?
By using Google Keyword Tool External and researching keywords in general.
It's my belief that keywords are essential to help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing link your sites to certain words, terms or phrases. There are literally hundreds of search engines the world over, but you only need to focus on the big three. (Actually, if you only focused on Google, you'd be okay here.) It's best to add keywords to every site, blog 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.
For another example, let me explain how I came to decide on the title for another book and the websites for it. The book is entirely focused on teaching others to create free websites and blogs. During the initial brainstorming sessions, I wrote down the major keywords and phrases that came to mind. Here's the partial list:
Create free website
Build free website
Make free website
Make free site
How to build free sites
Create free blog
Make a free blog
How to make free websites
Make my own website
Make your own website
My free blog
Your free website
And so on and so on. The very next step is to go to Google Keyword Tool External https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. There you can input these phrases individually or altogether and get valuable feedback from Google on which search terms are used the most and how much competition exists from other advertisers. By comparing each of these plus the synonyms, or similar terms Google automatically provides, it becomes clear which keywords should work best over time.
Back to our example. By comparing extremely similar phrases like "create free website," to "build free website" and "make free website," Google told me that "make free website" was a much more common search term than the others. I also learned that "website" is more commonly searched than "site" and "blog." Another revelation was that "your" was more commonly searched than "my" when mixed with these other phrases. I also wanted to include the word "own" because it implies ownership and only slightly reduced the number of searches per month. Turns out "your free website" gets searched 110,000 times per month while "your own free website" gets 74,000 searches (Jan 2011). That's a difference I can live with for a word that helps the title have more power for the consumer. Making sense?
In less than an hour I had narrowed my book title and website URL down to these possibilities:
Make your own free website
How to make your own free website
Your own free website
I checked the competition from other advertisers which is also included in the Keyword Tool results. It turns out when comparing "make your own free website" to "your own free website," the second phrase had 14,000 more searches per month and similar competition from other advertisers.
Then I checked name availability at both Godaddy and the websites where I wanted to create free examples for that book. Although the domain name was not available at Godaddy as a pure dot com, it was available at the venues to create my examples. And so I went ahead and registered it as yourownfreewebsite.webs.com and yourownfreewebsite.yolasite.com. (Know this; it doesn't matter if you have a long domain name. People click links to visit sites so your domain can be long. If that still bugs you or you feel it looks unprofessional, a change to a pure dot com is only about $10 per year.)
Additionally I battled with whether to use dashes, underscores or nothing to separate the words in the URL. Should the site be called your-own-free-website, or your_own_free_website or simply yourownfreewebsite? All of the research indicated that Google would find my site just fine in any case since they have such a complex algorithm with over 200 variables for detecting keywords, so this really boils down to personal preference. In the end I liked it this way, your-own-free-website.com because I believe it's the easiest way to read. Remember, you don't have to use dashes or underscores for Google to find the keywords in a URL. For that site I did spend a few bucks to have the custom domain name without the extra suffix, though for demonstration purposes I also created your-own-free-website.webs.com to show others not to worry about the extra suffix.
Finally, I wanted to name the book, How to Make Your Own Free Website. I went to Amazon and typed that exact phrase into a book search. I was delighted to see that no one had a book with that title. Surprisingly, there were very few titles even close to that, so I knew this would be a great name for people to find not only my website but my Amazon book as well. I included the subtitle for those who wanted more info on blogs and the title became, How to Make Your Own Free Website: And Your Free Blog Too. This way the keywords are part of the URL address and the book title, and over time people will certainly find me with search engine terms.
(Side note; even if someone already has a book with the same title that you'd like use, that doesn't copyright the title. There can be many books with the same title, like The Big Bang. You just can't have a book named Harry Potter and The Big Bang because the character, Harry Potter, is copyrighted material.)
So take your time not only brainstorming for names but also using Google Keyword Tool External to research the intelligence of your options. Ideally you can find some keywords that have low competition from other advertisers and high numbers of searches from users each month.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Remember to also check its availability as purely a .com as in solarbirdbath.com, because someday you may want to spend a few bucks and make the conversion. Name availability is easy to check at many places including Godaddy - http://www.godaddy.com/. If you find the perfect name for your website, such as solarbirdbath.com, and a registrar like Godaddy confirms that it is available, then you might want to spend up to $10 per year to reserve that domain name even if you're not ready to install it. The reason is so it will be there when it's needed, and no one can take it from you. Even if the dot com is not available, there are also options like solarbirdbath.info, solarbirdbath.net, solarbirdbath.biz and solarbirdbath.me.
Next step, let's look at blogging hosts with site-building software. |
