Choosing a Domain Name? Do Your Keyword Research First

19 Feb

Posted by admin as Articles, SEO, Tutotorial

As the ancient Chinese proverb says; “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” Choosing an appropriate name for your company takes careful thought and picking a domain name for your website is just as important a decision, especially when taking into account how fiercely competitive the world wide web is. Joshua Sloan, director of online marketing for the world’s most popular web host company, 1and1.com explains…

As the ancient Chinese proverb says; “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” Choosing an appropriate name for your company takes careful thought, and picking a domain name for your website is just as important a decision, especially when taking into account how fiercely competitive the world wide web can be.

Joshua Sloan, director of online marketing of the world’s most popular web host company 1and1.com, says they have registered and handled more than 8.8 million domain names, as well as providing additional tools to help customers build professional and helpful websites.

Carrying out some keyword research could be a deciding factor on which name you choose, as Sloan explains; “The process of finding keywords helps you understand the search behavior of your target consumers and first ideas of how you want your site to be found on search engines.”

“But if you are a new company there aren’t going to be many people looking for your brand. Usually that process of discovering keywords means adapting how you pick domain names.”

If the keywords relevant to your business are not in your brand name you may have to use a domain name which isn’t the same as your business name, or alternatively incorporate both.

For example, if I ran a family company called Henderson’s which was recognized locally by its brand name as a bakery, having a domain name like hendersons.com won’t tell potential customers on the web anything about the company. So, it would be beneficial to incorporate a keyword in the domain name like hendersonsbakery.com

Sloan says: “In the world of the internet you can use keywords anywhere in your domain name, url, directory, title tags, page name, content on the pages – this pattern of keyword relevancy all adds up to being beneficial to not only your visitors but also your site traffic.”

Research, and research, and research…

However, Sloan is quick to point out that when businesses start to build their website, keyword research and search engine optimization tend to be afterthoughts. “The average website builder does not necessarily understand the keyword relationship to architecture and page naming – directory naming and domain naming do all tend to come afterwards.

“If you were extremely knowledgeable you would know the time you invest in understanding the keyword relevancy to your site’s architecture is valuable because it tends to take longer to retro fit your site based on new keyword knowledge.”

However, Sloan recommends businesses launch a template site as opposed to nothing at all until a website has been fully designed. “If you don’t get something up you’re just going to extend the time needed to get value from your site,” he warns.

1&1 are now working alongside Wordtracker through the affiliate sales channel, which Sloan directs. “We are constantly looking for tools, tips, websites and products that help generate additional traffic, and preferably tools that aren’t expensive and have relatively low learning curves – because one thing a company cannot give to its clients is time.”

When asked what advice he has for young companies eager to put themselves on the web, Sloan harked back to his days as a college lecturer.

“I have this metaphor framework that I teach my own students and I call it the three rules of data.”

1) More data is better than less data.

2) All data is relative to the questions you ask about it or the way you think about it.

3) All the data in the world is not helpful unless you can make a decision on it.

“And that goes for whether you are analyzing your web traffic or how to battle severe competition, or picking a domain name for branding – it applies to a lot of different eCommerce sites and web businesses.“

Wordtracker Keyword Research Guide (Download)