There is no doubt that having your own domain name makes your blog look more professional. Your domain name brands your blog and it represents your blog. It is one of the first things people recognize, and it is a very important factor in the success of your blog. Naming your blog correctly is a very important step to having a successful blog.
When choosing a domain name you must think long-term. Spend good amount of time on researching the possibilities and make sure to chose the domain name that you really want. The last thing you want to do is make a bad decision and after some time choose to move to a new domain name. That can negatively affect everything you have built in terms of SEO, inbound links and branding.
Your domain name needs to be…
- Unique
- Catchy
- Easy to remember
- Short
- Simple (make it one word, do not use hyphens. I could have registered how-to-make-my-blog but it just isn’t as simple and easy as howtomakemyblog)
- Easy to spell
Keywords in the domain name
Your domain name should be relevant to your business, to the topic and content of your blog. If possible try to overlap your keywords in your domain name. It is possible to make it very natural and connect several keyword phrases together in one domain name. Some reasons for why you should use your keywords in the domain name:
- Keywords tell people what the blog is about
- Keywords make it easier to rank and get traffic from search engines
- Keywords are more likely to be used as anchor text when others link to you
Take a look at my domain name howtomakemyblog.com. Many people who mention my blog are linking to it using keywords like “how to blog”, “how to make a blog“, “how to make my blog”, or “make a blog” as the anchor text. This results in Google taking notice and ranking me higher for some of these keyword phrases.
See more information on this in my case study on how the keywords in my blog domain name affect my search engine rankings.
Domain name research tools
If you do not know what keywords to focus on use the following procedure to research your blog domain name keywords.
Nameboy and DomainSuggestions are two of the best sites that will give you a list of available domains according to your keywords.
Registering your domain name
Registering a domain name is a simple process. I personally use GoDaddy. When you buy a hosting account with your domain name, the cost of the domain name is only $1.99.
When you have your domain name, next step is to install your WordPress blog and start blogging about your passion!
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{ 15 comments }
Great tips, Marko! The keyword suggestion is probably the most useful, imo. Having keywords on your pages help, but it’s valuable to have keywords in your actual domain name as well.
When you said don’t use hyphens, I’m not so sure.
Would you rather buy domain name as ” make-blog.com or “makeblog.net ” ? It always bugs me. I would rather go for hyphened one …
Thanks for all comments!
@Matej – Yeah I should have added that. Go for .com domains rather than .net and other as much as you can, even if you must use a hyphen here and there.
@Gerald Weber – Great tip! Using trademarks in domain names can be dangerous, all depending on the policy of the company that owns the trademark. Some will hunt you down, some will let you go, some will even buy the domain from you…
@Josh – If you’re not a celebrity, having your name as domain name could slow down the growth of your blog initially. I get some 100+ visitors from Google daily these days, and those are mostly because of keywords in my domain name as explained. I wouldn’t have got those by having markosaric.com. But in the long run if you can build a brand and a name, like JohnChow or ChrisBrogan, it has great possibilities for you.
@Santosh Puthran – Yeah but thats Financial Times. As a small time blogger I wouldn’t recommend it. Take my example, if my domain name was HTMMB.com I would have much harder time promoting it, people would have hard time remembering it, Google would not realize the keywords etc.
Marko,
Let me add one really important point to the domain name making decision. If you are taking your blog or business seriously it’s a very good idea to do to a trademark search to be sure another company doesn’t have a trademark on the domain name you choose. I am speaking from my own personal experience I had a situation with a domain name I had owned for years and a company contacted me regarding a trademark infringement. the issue has since been resolved but the point is this. If you spend years building links and branding your domain name you could be forced to give it up if another entity has a legitimate (legal) trademark on the name you have chosen.
I little research beforehand can save you from a lot of anguish down the road.
Hi Marko,
I’m really enjoying your blog, came across it via twitter a week or so ago and you definitely have some valuable resources here.
Can you comment on people who use their name, or a derivative of their name as their url? John Chow would be a good example. Is the self branding worth the sacrifice in keywords?
Josh
All great advice. One thing I would add is try and get a “.com” if you can for your domain. They are just more recognized. But don’t get hung up about if your domain is not available as a “.com you could go for “.net”, “.org”, “.info”.
Andrew
@andrew I second your statement about the “.com”, although I would suggest getting a .info domain as a last resort, being that a lot of spam seems to be generated from .info domain names because they are usually on sale and cheaper for spammers to purchase.
Marko, I have two domain names, I’m using my name right now (jerhoyet.com), but my blog topic is (going to be) centered around blogging and social media, should I use my other domain name that is more topic-oriented or keep my current domain to build the brand around my name and services? (This stems from Josh’s question)
@Jeremiah Hoyet – Depends how far away you are with your current domain in terms of branding and SEO, but I would probably recommend getting a new blogging related domain for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier.
Great post
Started out with a domainname based on my last name
This domainename is not very keyword or user friendly – if you are in the online marketing and SEO business.
I therefore decided to market my products on another domaine, and find this helps me quite a bit in the rankings.
I would definately start out with a keyword based domainename if I had to do it all again.
catchy works for me – don’t read my blog – http://www.dontreadmyblog.com
It’s becuase I have some experience with buying domain names that I can totally relate to your blog entry. I think it is so powerul to use keywords in your domain title. Give the user exactly what they are looking for from the onset.
I would add that I would pick up the other extensions (.net, .org, .info, .tv, etc) just to propect my brand a bit after doing a TM search as was suggested.
I can not tell you how many times I want to revisit a site, but I can’t for the life of me remember the name. Short and Sweet and easy to remember would make your brand golden.
I would highly recommend that you DON’T get a .us domain. When I picked out my domain name, I registered the .com, .net, .org and .us domains. My problem occurred when I tried (later ) to add the privacy (proxy) option to the .us domain. You can’t do it. What that means is that ANYBODY can do a WHOIS on your .us domain and get all of your personal contact info. Canceling the .us domain at GoDaddy was easy. What sucked was that it took many months for my contact info associated with the .us domain to drop out of the WHOIS database.
It depends on whether you want to promote yourself and use your own name in the blog or choose a domain that has keywords.
Keywords do help, I can tell that from experience.
But in the end its the content and the way it is presented to the readers, is what matters.
this website is very helpful. thank you!
I have my own name as domain name. Your article is giving me second thoughts about my selection of domain name but i guess i’ll continue with it as keeping my own name as domain name gives me encouragement to keep working