Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

The second step in optimizing your website is choosing your domain name.

If you already have a domain name, then don’t worry about this step. It mostly likely will become less and less of factor for Search Engine optimization (although I tend to believe it will always be a factor). At the moment the keywords in your domain name are used by the Search Engines to rank your website. One way to visually see this is by going to one of the Search Engines and typing in a keyword phrase. For instance, try “website promotion book”. You will notice that any time one of those words appears in the URL, the words are highlighted. This shows you that the Search Engine is probably using the URL as one of it’s criteria for finding websites that matched your keyword. Keep this in mind when naming the pages of your website.

The first step in choosing your domain name is determining what the main keywords you want to target are (this is described in detail in the posts on choosing keywords).

The next step is to choose your domain name. Often times the domain name you want is already taken. For example, say that you want to choose the domain name bigwidgets.com because you have chosen to target big widgets. But bigwidgets.com is already taken. That is not a big problem. Maybe big-widgets.com is available. What if big-widgets.com is not available? There are many other names you could come up with that still contain your keywords. For instance, these are just a few:

mybigwidgets.com
my-big-widgets.com
the-big-widgets.com
bigwidgetsforyou.com
buybigwidgets.com
A1bigwidgets.com
1bigwidgets.com
widgetsbig.com
getbigwidgets.com

as you can see there really is an almost endless possibility of names you can choose that contain your keyword. In fact, two of the alternative domain names above may actually be better to have (read on to find out why). You may want to come up with a unique brand name and use that instead. This is fine, but since Search Engines do use the URL as a factor in your search ranking, it will give you a slight disadvantage. Branding a site with a unique memorable name can be helpful, and there is some debate in the web master community about which is better. Ultimately, that decision is yours. Ideally you would come up with a brandable domain name that also contains your main keywords.

There is one more factor that you may want to consider when coming up with your domain name. Many directories and links pages place websites in alphabetical order. Let’s take another look at the example above and place each site in alphabetical order:

1bigwidgets.com
A1bigwidgets.com
bigwidgetsforyou.com
buybigwidgets.com
getbidwidgets.com
mybigwidgets.com
my-big-widgets.com
the-big-widgets.com
widgetsbig.com

The advantage of getting listed higher in a directory is important, because the higher your site is on the page the more visitors you will get from that page. One way to get listed higher is by placing the number 1 at the front of your domain name, because valid numbers get placed ahead of the letter A by most programs that generate and alphabetic list. The reason for this is that Domain Names use the ASCII character set, which assigns numbers a lower value than letters.

Note: even though the number zero (0) appears ahead of the number 1, not many people will want to start their domain name with the number 0 because of the negative connotation associated with zero. It’s better to use “1”, “1st”, “123”, “A1” or something similar.

You may notice that I have not used numbers , etc. at the front of my domain names. That is because I don’t ever worry about being first in a list on a directory. While it can be nice, it’s only marginally important from a long term traffic standpoint.

One last note, don’t use the same keyword more than once in your URL (definitely not more than twice). Some Search Engines will consider that SPAM and will devalue your site for that.