Welcome to

Your Domain Name

Although a domain name is not free - well, almost at $9.99 or so a year, it’s what you do with that domain that can help you in your search engine listings.

Although the jury is still out with a definitive answer as to whether or not your keyword or phrase in your domain makes a difference in your search engine rankings, I suggest that if you can use it, do.

You’ll want to get your keyword as close to the front of your domain as possible. Here’s an example. Let’s say our market is “lamps”. There’s probably no way whatsoever that you’ll be able to get the domain name “lamps.com” but, you could use different variations while still keeping that term in the forefront.

Consider variations like “lampsforsale.com” or “lampsforthehome.com” or even “lampsthatinspire”.

Choose something that is easy to remember and has a cadence to it. Something like “lampslightlife.com” or “lampslicketysplit.com”.

I want you to notice something here. First of all, all of the domains I suggested are all .com domains. Although you’ll hear varying suggestions on the use of .net and .org domain names, I highly suggest that you purchase a .com domain since nearly everyone will, by default, enter your website and then “.com”.

Ideally, purchase all three versions of your domain; the .com, .net and .org versions as well.

Another thing I want you to notice is that I did NOT hyphenate the domains. There are plenty of arguments online that say it doesn’t matter if you have a hyphenated domain name or not since you’ll be found in the search engines anyway. I completely disagree.

There will be times, especially when people get to know your website name pretty darn well and they’re not going to be heading to the search engines to find you. They’ll just type in your domain name to get to where you are. If you use hyphens in your name, you are guaranteed that someone, somewhere will screw up and put in your domain name without the hyphens thus ending up at your competitions website.

Just consider these two alternatives:
LampsLightLife.com OR Lamps-Light-Life.com. Which one would YOU as a site visitor remember to type in, especially if you’re busy?

Better be safe than sorry and stick with a domain without hyphens.

And while we’re on the subject of domain names, I suggest GoDaddy
for that registration…if you want to take it further and talk about hosting (because you need somewhere to put your website) I suggest HostGator by far.

So remember, GoDaddy
for the domain registration and HostGator for the web hosting.

An easy way to get your website indexed quicker (that is, faster than sitting around and waiting for a bot to find you), is to have someone who is already indexed link to you.For example, let’s say that you’ve just finished your brand new website and you’re anxious to get it indexed in the search engines.

One way to do that - that I don’t recommend - is to submit your website to the search engines. This is an outdated technique and one that will take weeks if not months to come to fruition.

The second, more preferred method, is to have someone who is already indexed in a search engine (preferably Google), place a link on one of their indexed pages to your brand new site.

This way, when the Googlebot pays a visit to this already-indexed website and finds your link, it will follow that link to your brand new website and index the pages it finds there.

Here are a few additional tips that you might find helpful:

• When finding someone who is already indexed, try and get a link from a website whose content is relevant to yours. In otherwords, if you’re selling wedding dresses, see if you can find a wedding invitation website to link to you.
• Additionally, use anchor text that is relevant to your website. Anchor text is the “clickable” portion of the link. So for your wedding dresses website, you’d want the anchor text to be something like “wedding dresses” or “wedding gowns”.
• Be certain that all of your webpages you want placed in the search engines index can be found by the search engines. Ideally, make sure you have a site map on your website that contains links to all the other pages on your site, and that you link every page on your site to that site map.

These few tips should get your brand new site indexed in no time. As for what page they end up on once their indexed, is another story. Make sure you read the other tips contained on this site to help get you noticed.