How to pick a domain??

If you are reading this you might be close to setting up your first website ever or you can be a person with experience that is just curious to see if there are things that you might have missed. Whatever the case is I hope to be able to provide you with a few of the things that I feel are important when you are picking the right domain name for your new site.

I assume that you have already found the topic that you are going to be focusing on and therefore I will not go into any of the things that relate to how to find a profitable market online. The reason I say this is that I assume that your new site will somehow have a business-related theme as a personal website with pictures of your family and stuff that doesn't need much consideration when choosing the domain name.

So let us get into the things that I strongly feel you would have great benefit from.

It is a known fact that more and more traffic (aka visitors to your site) comes from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN (which has now launched their new site called Live). So with this fact in mind, you will need to find out how to get the best possible placement in the search engines so that people will come to visit your site.

Most online marketers agree that from an SEO point of you the right keyword-rich domain name can help your site rank better than if you are not using a keyword-rich domain name. You might say that site like Nike.com, Amazon.com and Ebay.com doesn't have keyword-rich names and you are right.

However, the difference between you and the great site is that they have a much larger advertising budget than you have and therefore they can get away with having names that don't make much sense. So if you are on a small budget I suggest that you go for the keyword-rich domain name approach.

Choosing a keyword-rich domain name does not mean that you will have to end up with a name that nobody will ever remember. That can be the case but it doesn't have to be. Let us say that you are going to create a site that deals with pets. Maybe you want to sell pet toys and other accessories.

What I would do is to go to the site called: http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html and sign up for the free trial. Once you have received the e-mail from WordTracker you would enter "pets" in the field.

You'll see that the word "pet supplies" has a count of 2,000-2,500 visitors in 90 days. If you had paid for the full version of WordTracker (I strongly recommend that you do) you would have found that for the keyword phrase "pet toys and supplies" and that 145 people are searching for that particular phrase every day and that only 857 sites are competing for that exact phrase.

Now that is great information and you can now use it for finding a domain name that will 1) Tell your visitors what it is that you do and 

2) hold some great keywords that you will want to target to rank in the search engines.

If you go to the site called: http://idenion.dk/tools/multidomaincheck.aspx you'll be able to enter domain names in the box and test whether they are available. I have just tested the domains pettoysandsupplies.com and pet-toys-and-supplies.com and both of them are available. That is great news as the domains names will help you with some of the ways to get the high rankings that you want.