Choose a Blog Domain Name and Title

After making the decision to start a new blog, two of the most important decisions you have to make are what to choose for your blog’s domain name (i.e., the URL or blog address), and what the blog title will be. Your choice for both of these steps should be guided by:

Who your anticipated audience is going to be.

What the primary topic covered by your blog is.

In other words, you want to put yourself in the mind of someone getting ready to type a search term or phrase into Google – what would you want them to type in if your goal was to have your blog show up on the first page of search results? This search term or set of terms is known as a keyword or keyword phrase, and these few words are going to be all-important to your ability to get your blog to rank highly in the search engines. That being said, there are a few things to keep in mind:

You want your keywords to be specific, but you must also remember that there can be a lot of competition for highly sought after keywords. For example, a blog with “cars” as the target keyword would probably have a hard time making it to the top of Google since you would be competing with the likes of Toyota, Ford, and every car dealership in the country for Google search results (and these companies have huge advertising budgets that a new blogger simply cannot match). Thus, you need to be realistic in choosing your target keywords – “cars” won’t work, but something more targeted and specific like “cars in (insert your town here)” might have a shot at rising high in the search results.

Although having reasonable, targeted keywords is important, you also want to make sure that people are actually searching for them. If you choose something so targeted that only a few people a year ever type it into Google, it won’t do you much good.

If you need help deciding on an appropriate set of keywords to use in your domain or blog title, there are tools out there that can help. My personal favorite is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you go to this site and enter a keyword phrase, the tool will spit out a long list of related keywords along with information on advertiser competition and monthly search volume (i.e., how many times that term/phrase was searched for in a given month).

For example, I write a blog on running, and typing “running” into the Google AdWords keyword tool reveals that the competition bar is maxed out. Furthermore, “running” was searched for over 13.5 million times in May 2009. In other words, a new blogger has no shot at ranking for the term “running.” However, typing in the phrase “running marathons” shows that this is a phrase for which you might have a chance to rank. It pays to do some research using tools like this, and though I’m still new enough at this myself as to not have a recommendation about how high to shoot, if you be realistic and do some research on how to properly optimize your site, you can be very successful in your targeted niche.

So to summarize, when you decide to start a blog, choose a topic and think about what your audience would type into Google to get there. Target specific keywords, but try not to choose keywords that are in excessively high demand – it’s a balancing act, but one that you will figure out with time. Once you decide on a set of keywords, try to incorporate these into both the blog domain name and title. With a little research and effort, you can have good success at ranking in search engines if you follow these tips.