Choosing a Website name

Doc Stone June 28, 2011 7 Comments

This is probably the most important thing you can do when building a website.  About the only time that research won’t help you is if you are branding yourself.  Then get something like jamesstone.com.  Here’s the thing I don’t think most people realize.  If you sold lightbulbs and you owned lightbulbs.com, realize that you would never have to buy advertising for your website, ever.  You will always be at the top of any search for light bulbs.  So having what you do in the website name is very important.

As an example, my website http://www.pasorobleswebdesign.com.  The company name is Phillips Software.  When you go to the site, you see Web Wizards all over it.  I was after my local market where I live in Paso Robles CA and web design is what I wanted to own.  I think I ended up with a great website name which reflects my local market and what I do.

So, how did come to this conclusion.  I think the Paso Robles part speaks for itself.  But why Web Design?  That took some research.  I use the Google External Keyword Tool extensively.  https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none  Here you can enter what you think is your best keywords to start and work forward.  The tool gives you search numbers on local and global levels so you can see what people actually enter to do searches.  You don’t want one with too few searches.  That would mean nobody uses those words to search on and nobody would find you or your traffic would be almost non-existent.  Conversely, you don’t want big numbers either.  That means the search is too general and you’ll get all kinds of traffic but the kind you want.  You want something in the middle or slightly lower.  That gets you the kind of traffic you are looking for and the people searching for would find what they were looking for, that would be you.   In my example, after doing some research, it seemed the 2 words web design coupled with my local area fit the ticket. 

One thing that is very important to mention, once you choose your keyword phrase, you will optimize the entire website to these words.  That’s not just the website name, but the alt tags, the titles, the subtitles, the text in the body, everywhere.  I can’t stress enough how important the selection of your keywords really is.

That brings me to a few words about keyword phrasing.  In most of my sites, I use 4 or 5 words together.  In the case of a local search, you can go wider since there is less traffic in a local area than global.  Let’s say I chose “cheap web design websites” as my 4 word phrase.  If I don’t use quotation marks around the phrase, I have 4 free standing words in the order shown.  That would mean I show up in a search for just “web design” but I also show up in a search for just “design” and also “cheap web design”.  The words will only work in the order shown, I would not show up in a search for “cheap design”. 

Another thing to consider. your competition.  This matters if you want a top ten listing in a competitive set of keywords.  You want to do just a bit more than your competition but not too much more.  If you know who your competition is, you can find their websites, click on page, and then view source in your browser.  You will find the meta keywords tags somewhere and see what they use for keywords.  You might get some ideas for your own site.  Take some of these keywords, enter them into Google and do some searches, see all the places they show up.  You’ll get a much better idea of what you’ll need to do to rank higher than your competition. 

That’s enough for this article.  Please make a comment.