Domain Names are Really Important

There's a saying in the Real Estate business - they say that the 3 most important things are location, location and location. Well, in regards to a new internet business, it's domain name, domain name and domain name. Yes, a domain name is that important.

In the early days of the internet, domain names were fairly easy. There were so many good names still available, but as more and more businesses migrated to the internet, the best names were taken. As the time passed, finding a good domain name to register has become increasingly difficult.

Why is a domain name so important? For one thing, a domain name can help you get the traffic to your website. If you don't get traffic, you might as well not even have a website. There's no doubt about it, if you want to make money, you need traffic.

A domain name can help you to get traffic in a couple of ways. First of all, if your domain name is catchy and easy to remember, that will help people to find your website and to return for future visits. It's also a good idea if your domain name gives some indication of the type of business you have. For example, if you want to have a website that helps people consolidate their student loans, it would be a good idea to have a domain name that contained some or all of those words. You might do good with "studentloans.com" or "studentloanconsolidation.com" or something similar. You can even use hyphens in the domain name, like "student-loan-consolidation.com", etc.

The point here is that your domain name should be descriptive of your business. After all, if you were looking for a new dentist, would you be likely to visit "BigBubbaMotorcycles.com" or "GreatDentists.com"? If Big Bubba is a dentist, he's probably not going to get many new dental patients thru his website.

Let's talk about the domain names with hyphens before we move on. Contrary to what many people think, having hyphens in your domain name does not hurt your search engine listings. Most of the search engines treat the hyphens as a space, so the hyphens make it a little easier for them to separate out the individual words.

About the only downside of using hyphens is that when people type in your URL, they may forget to put in the hyphens and go to a competitors website instead. Personally, I don't think this is too much of a problem, since most people find websites thru search engines, so they'll be clicking directly on a link to your website instead of typing it in by hand.

Again, it's really important to embed keywords about your business into your domain name for good search engine ranking. Although some domains, like ebay.com or google.com do get a lot of traffic, it's not because of any keyword in the domain name. What is an 'ebay' anyhow?

You'll find that most of the high traffic websites with short, unrelated domain names get their huge amount of traffic thru paid promotional campaigns. They use radio & TV ads, high volume email advertising and other such methods that might be too expensive for a small business just getting started.

A good way to find your domain name is to develop a list of keywords that are strongly associated with your business. Write down as many keywords as you can think of, as long as they're on your subject. Once you have your list, you can use one of the several free online tools to help select just the right domain name for your new website.

The domain name registrar at www.godaddy.com has a search feature where you can check the availability of domain names and the results will even show you other closely related domain names that are available. Another handy suggestion tool is at www.domainfellow.com Either one of these online tools will help you to find a good domain name that's still available to register.

Here's a good tip for you when trying to find a domain name that has your keywords in it - If you can't find a domain name that has your keyword and is still available, you should consider using sub-domain names instead.

What's a sub-domain name? A sub-domain name is a prefix to a normal domain name. Let's say that you're in the retail computer business and you want to sell computers at your website. That's a fairly competitive business, so you'll probably have a hard time coming up with a good domain name that's not already taken.

An alternative would be to choose some sort of generic term for a domain name and then use a sub-domain for your computer business. For example, let's say that you register the domain name "lowestprice.com" That's pretty generic, wouldn't you agree? Now that you have that domain name registered, you can create all the sub-domains you want, limited only by your imagination and the size of your web hosting account.

Remembering that you're in the computer business, you could now have your website at the sub-domain "computers.lowestprice.com" Using this same approach, you could go into just about any other business and have sub-domains like "insurance.lowestprice.com" and so on. See how it works?

Another good thing about sub-domains is that they don't require registration. You only pay to register the main domain name. By using sub-domain names, you can easily embed your keywords and it won't cost you any more money. And the search engines treat each sub-domain as a totally separate entity, so your search engine ranking for one sub-domain won't be dependent upon you having a high ranking for your main domain name.

Once you find your new domain name, you'll need to register it. I recommend godaddy.com for registering. Their prices are reasonable and their service is great. However, there are many, many companies that provide domain name registration services, so pick whichever one you like.