How to Choose The Best Domain Names

Choosing the best domain name for your niche is important but maybe not as important as some would lead you to believe. A good domain name will bring you organic (search engine) traffic simply because the name matches the keyword search but the days of finding a domain name with high levels of search volume are long gone.

A quick note for those new to the craft:  Keywords can be defined as the specific terms used by person to search for something on the net. For example, to find this page, you may have searched for “domain names” or “best domain names”.

A good domain name will contain one or two keywords related to the niche you have chosen. The shorter the keyword the better but is become increasingly hard to find good two word names and a one word name is nearly impossible. You can however increase your odds by adding your name (or something you make up to the keywords. For example,the keyword combination “guitar lessons” gets a lot of searches, 28,000 per  month at the time of this righting. This domain name is taken but by making it dougsguitarlessons.com you will still get a boost in the search engine rankings from the keywords “guitar lessons”

Another method that I actually prefer is to reasearch the keywords related to my niche and find and exact match to use as my domain name. It sometimes has as many as 4 words in the name but is guaranteed to bring organic search and higher page rankings.  Again using “guitar lessons” as an example, take a look below.

As you can see above “guitarlessons.com” is fifth on the the search page with some very heavy hitters as competition. The domain name by itself will never bring you a lot of traffic (visitors). There is much more work to be done if you want the kind of traffic that the sites above recieve.

Anyway, this is how I choose my domain names. It first starts with keyword research and while there are many keyword tools on the market that you can buy one of the best is actually free. It is the “Google Search-Based Keyword Tool”. When you enter “guitar lessons” in the “word or phrase box” and click on “Find Keywords” the result is show below.

Once I have done this I will click on the export button and export the results to an excell spreadsheet. I then copy the the first column of the spreadsheet, which are the keywords and paist them to notepad. Once in notepad I take out all the spaces between the words and delete any phrases that don’t fit my niche and you will get the result below.

I will then go to “PlugSocket”, it’s free, where they have a multiple domain name search tool that allows you to try ten domain names at a time and it will tell you if they are available or not. You may have to go through as many as 100 domain names before you find one that is available and you like.

Once you have one you are satisfied with go to your web host and register the domain name and you are ready to build your site. Remember though, the domain name isn’t everything. There are many factors to building a website and your domain name is just one of them. In fact some of the sites with the best traffic have the craziest names but they do other things really well.