The name you give your business is certainly an important decision. Some people choose a name for sentimental reasons (as in a child’s name) and others want the name of the business to reflect what the business does. The latter is a much better choice in the world of online commerce because the word or words (aka keyphrase) in your domain name can help your business be found by the people seeking your specific product or service on search engines. It is so much a of better choice that people with new or unpopular websites should seriously consider changing domain names if their current name does not describe their business. Buying a new name is very cheap compared to what it will give back. Some say the words in your domain name can count for as much as 30% in determining page placement for searches where they are involved.
Even if your site has been online for years you may want to rename it if the traffic is slow. Your current site can be redirected to your new named site using a 301 redirect which will transfer all of its traffic and most of its authority, links, and page rank to your newly named site. There can be several reasons why traffic can be slow at your site so renaming it may just be one step in doing what is right to get more visitors. A good, descriptive domain name is very important but if your site has not had proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then your domain name will not matter much because SEO is the only way to make Google take notice of your website and push it to the front of the list. SEO is a different topic but too important not to mention.
You must be descriptive in your domain name in order to avoid unnecessarily competing with websites seeking different visitors. If you own an employment agency that recruits black professionals [3] then you do not want to have a domain that says ‘Professionals.com’ or ‘JobsForProfessionals.com’. You need to use the word ‘black’ or ‘African American’ in your name.
Your business website domain name does not have to be the same as your everyday business name. Sometimes the domain name is already taken so it is not possible. Domain name words are a very powerful factor in Google’s algorithm (as well as Bing’s, Yahoo’s and others) which decides who lands on page one in search results involving those words. You should take advantage of this fact by choosing a domain name with words that are relevant to your business and have a high number of monthly searches.
EXAMPLE:
If you have a lawn care business ask yourself what you would type if you were doing a search for this service.
Go to GoogleAdwords.com and use the tool that counts the number of monthly hits for keywords:
lawn services
cut grass
cutting grass
lawn care
lawn and garden service
lawn and garden care
garden and lawn care
garden and lawn service
green gardeners
green lawn services
lawn services
lawn care services
Try all the different combinations you can think of for your particular trade. See which ones bring back the most searches. This search tool will also give you some suggestions for phrases you did not think of. Check out the domain names and homepage keywords of your competitors to see what words they are using and check how often they are searched too.
The above terms are very common and will already have domains that are taken but adding a word to them can get that phrase in your domain name. If the phrase ‘lawn service’ had a huge number of hits but LawnService.com is not available you may want to name your domain something like ‘LawnServiceBaltimore.com’. If someone else already has ‘LawnServiceBaltimore.com' registered you can opt for ‘LawnServiceBaltimore.net’ if the number of hits ‘lawn service’ had was so much higher compared with the one in second place that you feel you must use it. This may not make the LawnServiceBaltimore.com guys happy but you still will have those powerful words in your domain.
If you already have a good domain name with a .com extension you may want to register the .net version to protect your brand. The LawnServiceBaltimore.com company can protect its brand by registering the .net version before anyone else does. They can also register their domain in .org, .info, .me, .us and several other extensions (TLD’s) available for even more brand protection.
To find out if a new domain name is available or search for parked or old domains for sale go to CheapNames.com or GoDaddy.com.
Get more tips and advice on how to drive more traffic to your African American website [4] at Low Cost SEO [5] .biz