InternetBusinessManual.com - Step 4: Domain Name Search

What are the four elements in a winning Internet domain name?

Ranks high in its category on the search engines
Contains important words your customers would type in to find you
Conveys what your business is about
Easy to remember

Alphabetical listings used to be all you would find when you visited a category on Yahoo, but now above the regular Site Listings are Sponsor Listings (defined as commercial sites already listed in the Yahoo Directory which are paying a monthly fee deemed by Yahoo to receive prime placement above the regular listings).

So, what once was a good thing—–using domain names starting with the letter A, or numbers, or even punctuation marks to be listed above your competition—–no longer applies with the major search engines, with the exception of the Open Directory Project, which still utilizes the alphabetic structure in its placement tier, as well as some webmasters in their link directories. Because the alphabetical system still does exist online, if, in your domain name search, you are torn between several names, go for the name starting with a letter higher in the alphabet.

Dot-com at the end is a stronger ending than dot-ws, dot-net, or dot-anything-else, because the general public is most familiar with and expects .com at the end of business web addresses. Again, you want to go with the familiar and easily remembered.

Hyphens between keywords in your domain name can benefit you in search engine listings. The reason is search engines will recognize each of those words separately in your URL, and give relevance to each word. However, lately the search engines have gotten 'smarter' and can pick out the individual words in a domain name without hyphens, so this strategy may be a thing of the past.

Be advised that whatever name you list on your home page as your company name will be what the editors of the directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory will list as your title of your listing.

Whereas, paid advertising search engines let you use descriptive phrases as your title. Money talks. So if you want your domain name to be your business title, do not give an alternative business name either in your site's title, copyright holder name, or even in your site's domain registration information.

Since the power of alphabetical listings has been greatly undermined by the placement of paid listings above them, using tactics to place yourself alphabetically on top are no longer as important as they once were.

It is more important that you focus on finding which keywords are the most popular your targeted market would use to locate you. Then, put those words into your domain name. Again, the main thing to follow is to pick a domain name that immediately communicates to your prospect you have what they are looking for.

So if people are looking for beeswax candles, naming your website beeswaxcandleshop.com will draw you more visitors, than if you sold beeswax candles and named your website negative-ion-makers.com.

People looking for beeswax candles will first go to the listings with the words beeswax candles in their names, and if they don’t find what they want at those sites, then they will venture to the listings in that category with the weird unrelated names to beeswax candles.

For instance, if you were going to sell pepper spray because your research on the market revealed to you a high demand for that product on those keywords, then you should put the most effective words into your name.

In this case those words would be “pepper spray”.

Then, each time someone typed in the words “pepper spray” into an Inktomi-based search, or Yahoo search—–both which deliver listings containing those keywords in either the title, URL and description—–your web site would be one of the top ones to appear since both your business name and web address feature this phrase.