Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain
The worst mistake I’ve made with my blog (forgedeuphoria.com/blog) was not choosing a more appropriate domain name, which can be attributed to my attitude to simply rush in and do things without thinking them through.
These should be the steps taken when making a decision into which domain to buy:
- Select a niche or core topic for your site.
- Clearly define the purpose and goals of your site.
- Choose an appropriate domain name.
I think it’s obvious that I missed the boat on all of the steps when choosing my domain. When I started my blog I had no idea what I was going to write about and now that I’ve settled on some topics I’m starting to suffer for it.
Your choice of domain name can be the most important decision you make for your site and can make or break it too.
I’m #1 on Google’s search results page for “forged euphoria”. Surprisingly I’ve actually had a few hits from people looking for this. I have no idea what they expected to find.
Anyway, the reason I’m #1 for that term is because everyone links to this site with the anchor tag “Forged Euphoria”, so naturally I’m up there in the rankings; the only problem is this isn’t the term I want to rank high with.
The key is choosing a domain that relates specifically to your niche and has your desired keywords in the title.
For example if you were going to start a blog about cars, cars-blog.com or blog-about-cars.com would be two I’d consider using. When people link to you the majority of the time the anchor tag they’d use would be “Cars Blog” or “Blog About Cars”.
Having people link to you is great, having them link with relevant keywords in the anchor tag is much much better. If your domain name contains keywords relevant to your niche you force people to link to your site with the exact keywords which will help you get a better search engine ranking.
If you’re thinking of buying a new domain first consider your niche and the purpose of your blog before you even start throwing around ideas for names. Don’t make my mistake and get stuck trying to make the best of a bad situation and suffer for it in the future.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Aeriff –
You’re correct as far as some of the considerations that should go into choosing a domain name, however, FWIW, there is more to being found on the search engines than the name. Looking at your blog, the first thing I would suggest is that you create a keywords metatag in your header that references the terms you would like search engines to consider in indexing your site. Regardless of the domain name, I would also suggest that the blog’s about page clearly define what the subject and focus of the blog is going to be – that page will be picked up by search engines and help to get you ranked for appropriate search terms. Finally, of course, you could always change the domain name to something else – while retaining the original name in a forwarding mode so as not to lose the users that already know you by that name.
-Danny.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Well you're right, I made the same mistake so I think I'm going to change my current domain name http://www.mylotnovice.com to http://www.entrepreneurnovice.com since I just started.