By Lesley Komlos

When it comes to selecting the best domain name for a new website, it is not as simple as just choosing a name that you like or your company name, although choosing a catchy name can be good for branding. The domain name itself, along with any page names within the site, can all help or hinder how easily your site will be found by the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are several factors to consider when first contemplating a new domain name.

The first consideration is to try and choose a domain name that sufficiently expresses your services and/or products; it also needs to be a broad enough term that will cover any expansion in the products and services offered by the site. Ideally it is best to choose a name that can be easily remembered by people, to encourage repeat visits from customers that come to know your website domain name, along with the products or services that you offer.

From a search engine optimisation perspective it is best to choose a name that contains your most significant keywords or keyword phrase. This is one of the factors that can help your site to be search engine friendly and therefore, along with other factors, be more easily found and gain higher rankings in the search engines.
So how do you determine which is the best keyword to use?

There are several tools available freely online that can help you to establish the best ones to choose from, my personal favorite is the Google keyword tool. To find this simply type, ‘Google keyword tool’ into the Google search box, and it should come up within the first few results.

To use this tool is very easy, simply type in the main two or three keywords or keyword phrases that relate to your business, for example if your business is security and alarm systems and you are located in Nashville, you would type in:

• ’security Nashville’
• ‘alarm systems’
• ‘alarm systems Nashville’ and
• ‘Home security Nashville’.

Then click on ‘get keyword ideas’.

The tool will then give you a whole heap of keyword ideas, mostly related to your business. Next to each of these will be numbers indicating the number of searches conducted each month on each of the particular keywords. There will probably be several that have a significant number of searches per month so if it is possible to combine them to make your domain name that is a good option.

So as for the example above, these may include ’security alarms’ ‘home security’ and ‘alarm systems Nashville’. A great way to include all three of these keyword phrases would be to choose the domain name “HomeSecurityAlarmSystemsNashville” if that is unavailable you could try putting a dash between each of the words.