How To Choose A Domain Name to Make Money Online Now

This post is one in a series about how to Really Make Money Online. If you haven’t read the original page, I suggest you do so now so you know where this fits in.

I am going to look at choosing a domain name based on one final objective: to be on page one of the search engine results. My chief objective in building a website is to make money online, not to be popular (even though that helps) or to have a cool website name that looks good on a bumper sticker. With that in mind we begin our quest for a good domain name.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. That is were we start. And incidentally that’s also where I’m going to end. So far everything I’ve done like choosing a niche and writing my content has been centered around keywords. Choosing a domain is no different. I have come up with my method of picking a domain name not by reading what is “web friendly”, or what any expert tells me but by what I see come up in  the search results. The actual search results don’t lie. Your domain name must contain one thing: your keywords. And preferably nothing else.

In fact I’m not even comfortable with the domain name of this blog, but the “make money online” market is so competitive I really didn’t have a lot of options. I might even change it if I fail to get to page one within a few months. But enough about me. Choosing a domain name is actually quite simple. For anyone who doesn’t even know where to buy domain names I recommend that you use GoDaddy. It’s one of the easiest interfaces and the support there is phenomenal. And you can host your site there cheap also but as I have found out, you need to be careful as they do some things a little differently to the point where sometimes scripts don’t always function 100% on their servers. I have been using them exclusively for the past 7-8 years because of their reliability but there are some trade offs.

Back to choosing a domain name. As much as I’d like, I can’t just choose any domain name I want as it may already be taken, but I will only settle for a few alternatives. The number one choice is always keyword.com, no hyphens; just the keyword phrase you are targeting followed by dot com. If you can’t get that exact phrase you have two alternatives: hyphenate your words or use a different suffix.

This next bit is important. In spite of the fact that many so called experts will tell you to get a dot com name at all costs do not listen to them. If you can’t get the dot com name you want then try and get keyword.net, keyword.org or keyword.info in that order. I have repeatedly seen proof that your keyword phrase followed by one of these endings will do better in the search results than a hyphenated phrase. If you don’t believe me then start taking notice to the search results you see when you are looking for something. You will realize I am right.

If you’re not able to get one these domain names then my next step would be to take my keyword and add another non-descriptive word like site, online, blog or web and add it to your keyword with a hyphen. Like “blog-makemoneyonline.com”. The search engines are not dumb, they will know to ignore those words as the results prove.

If I am unable to get my domain name using any of the above methods then I have no choice but to hyphenate my keywords. (EX. play-the-guitar dot something) You want your keywords in your domain name no matter what. Now some of you may be saying to yourself, “Scott, you’re full of crap, I see lots of search results that don’t have the keywords in the domain name”. You’re correct, but what those sites do have is tons of content and many pages of it. Remember, we are here to make money and to do it by getting on Page One with the least amount of effort as possible and the least amount of content. What I lack in content I have to make up with in keyword usage.

So that is how I pick a domain name and, let me tell you, I have many sites out where I did this all wrong. And most I have not changed because of in-links and the site age bonus that Google gives. Don’t make these mistakes. Get the correct domain name for your site the first time so that you don’t have to write pages and pages of content to get a good listing position. In a niche where there is little competition a good domain name with some decent content and SEO can literally get you on page one in less than a week. A poorly chosen one can cause you to have add pages of content and backlinks for the same listing. Why would you want to do all that?