How to pick a domain

If you are reading this you might be close to setting up your first website ever or you can be a person with experience that is just curious to see if there are things that you might have missed. Whatever the case is I hope to be able to provide you with a few of the things that I personally feel are important when you are picking the right domain name for your new site.

I assume that you have already found the topic that you are going to be focusing on and therefore I will not go into any of the things that relates on how to find a profitable market online. The reason I say this is that I assume that you new site will somehow have a business related theme as a personal website with pictures of your family and stuff doesn't need much consideration when choosing the domain name.

So let us get into the things that I strongly feel you would have great benefit from.

It is a know fact that more and more traffic (aka visitors to your site) comes from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (which has now launched their new site called Live). So with this fact in mind you will need to find out how to get the best possible placement in the search engines so that people will come visit your site.

Most online marketers agree that from a SEO point of you the right keyword rich domain name can help your site rank better that if you are not using a keyword rich domain name. You might say that site like Nike.com, Amazon.com and Ebay.com doesn't have keyword rich names and you are absolutely right.

However the difference between you and the great site is that they have much larger advertising budget than you have and therefore they can get away with having names that doesn't make much sense. So if you are on a small budget I suggest that you go for the keyword rich domain name approach.

Choosing a keyword rich domain name does not mean that you will have to end up with a name that nobody will ever remember. That can be the case but it doesn't have to be. Let us say that you are going to create a site that deals with pets. Maybe you want to sell pet toys and other accessories.

What I would do is to go to the site called: http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html and sign up for the free trial. Once you have received the e-mail from WordTracker you would enter "pets" in the field.

You'll see that the word "pet supplies" has a count of 2,000-2,500 visitors in a 90 day period. If you had paid for the full version of WordTracker (I strongly recommend that you do) you would have found that for the keyword phrase "pet toys and supplies" and that 145 people are searching for that particular phrase every day and that there are only 857 sites competing for that exact phrase.