How to Select Domain Names for Websites

This article shows you how to select a domain name for your website. This is something you should do even before you build your site.

Selecting a domain name is the first step in the process of online marketing. Picking a name for your site is not a difficult task, but, should be given due consideration. Although it might not affect your search engine rankings, it is your identity for both search engines and users.

If your company is into more than one product or service, which is not co-related, you should create separate sites for all of them. If you decide to spill your main site into multiple sites, be sure you do not create a duplicate site by copying your main one into a separate domain altogether. Such practices can be easily detected by search engines and you then stand the chance of being blacklisted by them.

As per SEO experts, it is always better to use different hosting companies for all your sites. If you have multiple similar-looking sites on the same server, the search engine might consider it them as duplicate websites. Make corresponding changes in your IP address whenever you split domains.

A number of search engine optimizers create 'mini' sites to enhance their traffic influx or strengthen their link exchange programme. Most of these sites have very little, or no content whatsoever – another problematic area, as far as search engines are concerned. Do not try to create ambiguous links to boost PageRank; you will be easily caught by search engine spiders.

Domain names can be booked for a meagre amount. Therefore, you should register a site name made up of your main keyword. You can make use of 'domain forwarding' to get traffic from your secondary keywords as well. For example, for a main site called homeloans, you can use domain pointers like homeloan, home-loan, or home-loans, etc. The basic catch is to use various combinations of your home site's name.

SEO services providers often suggest the use of subdomains in order to get more traffic. These are also known as prefix domains and are considered as separate domain names altogether. For a website that talks of distinctly-related issues, creating different domains and subdomains is a great idea. A server redirects each subdomain to a different folder, thus increasing your flow of traffic.

These issues should be taken care of by webmasters as they demand a lot of technical know-how. It is imperative to remember that each of your domain names should have suggestive keywords incorporated into it in order to catch the search engine spiders' attention.