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10 Tips for Naming your Domain for SEO 

There are so many different things that we can do for SEO. Sometimes we forget the little things. One of those things is choosing the right domain name. The following ten tips will help you to properly name your domain to take advantage of SEO opportunities.

1. Use your main keyword in the domain name. If there was only one keyword that you wanted your business to show up for when people typed it into a search, what would that keyword be? Figure out a way to incorporate that into the domain name.
2. Make it brandable. For example, if your keyword is “SEO” then find a way to use that while making your own unique brand from it (such as SEOtastic or awesomeSEO or SEObsessed).
3. Skip the silly characters and spaces. Don’t use underscores, dahes or special characters in your domain name since this detracts from SEO value.
4. Avoid using numbers in the domain name. As with characters and spaces, numbers don’t really do well in terms of SEO. Of course, there are exceptions such as if your business name uses a number and you want the domain to be the business name. In general, though, leave numbers off of your domain name if you want good SEO.
5. Choose a short name. This is getting tougher as fewer and fewer domain names are available. However, it’s still recommended if you can find a relevant short domain name that hasn’t yet been taken.
6. Select a domain name that people would feel credible linking to. As a blogger, would you rather link to “I Am a Loser” or “Amazing Winning Strategies”? You want people to feel proud of linking to your domain name so that they will do it more and increase your site’s value.
7. Go with a .com domain name. There are a lot of other options these days (such as .net) but the .com domain name remains the most popular extension. It tends to have higher SEO ranking. The only exception would be if you appropriately qualify for a .gov or .edu or .org domain name.
8. Add the other types of domains only for the purpose of pointing back to your main domain. In other words, if your original domain name is DomainName.com then you might go ahead and get DomainName.net and DomainName.org as well. However, these would only be used to create attention and links for the main site which is at the .com.
9. Double check whether the domain name has had any problems in the past. You want to research what the history of the domain name is. That is because if the name has had bad listings and problems with search engines in the past then it could serve as a black mark on you, decreasing SEO rank value through no fault of your own.
10. Register your domain for 3+ years at a time. If you only register your domain name for one year then search engines may suspect that you aren’t going to be around for a long time. This decreases their interest in giving you a high ranking. Longer-term registration improves SEO ranking.