Domain Name Research

• Introduction:
  We have found through extensive experience that the domain name of your website plays a huge role in determining the relevance your your website in relation to the weight that the search engines place on the domain name. We have laid out sort of a map to choosing the correct domain name for you and have included a few awesome tools you can use to search with.
   

• Domain name research:
  The first step in obtaining a web site should be determining the domain name and then purchasing the domain name. Before buying any domain name, one would need to determine what one or two or even three keywords or phrases someone would type into the search engines to find them. (After that, The time has come for the actual purchase of a domain name).
  
  Here's what we had to do to research our domain name of: www.helpmywebsite.org
  We researched the keywords we thought we would type into the search engines and then chose the highest traffic keywords we thought we could find. Next, we went to networksolutions.com and started typing in related words and searched for .com and .org names until we found one that was available. We had to keep working at this for over an hour until we found a domain name that matched what we were writing this website about.
   

• Weighting your domain name:
  We have found this to be very true after the search engines get done doing their crawl on our domain names. We have found it better to attempt to place your primary keyword at the beginning of your domain name.
  
  Example: We had initially chosen the domain name of, websitefreehelp.com but after researching the search engines, we found it more relevant to go with help my website instead, Why?
  
  Well, we found that the word HELP lent more value and weight when we did our keyword search campaign. So, we purchased the domain name with HELP and started it off at the beginning of the domain name we targeted.
   

• Domain companies and pricing:
  There are literally hundreds if not thousands of entities that are offering domain names at discounts. We have experienced not so good deals and some killer deals, sometimes "Too Good To Be True".
  
  Kind of a rule of thumb! Domain prices vary from the real cheap $4.95 to the rather extravagant $34.99 per year domains. What we normally pay is around $8.99 per year. Yeah, we have found better deals than that, but there are normally limitations and specific things we like to stay away from. We happen to shop at Godaddy.com and we are very happy with them for many reasons but not limited to the fact you can set up free URL forwarding and mask it as well with meta tags, nevertheless...
   

• 1 year domain names:
  There has been a lot of discussion that we have seen that targets domain names that have been purchased on a monthly basis and also domain names that have been purchased only for a 1 year term. It seems the rumor around the webmaster world has it that you may get automatically penalized by the search engines if you purchase a domain name on a monthly basis and also only a yearly basis due to a higher potential for spam.
  
  With that being said, we NEVER purchase monthly domain names and we always purchase domain names for at least 2 years in advance. You can do what ever is best for your budget, but think about this, what's 19 bucks for a 2 year domain name just to be safe?
  
  You should have a pretty good understanding about domain names after everything we have covered. If you have any questions, you can visit our Webmaster Forum and maybe someone in there can help you.
  
  Now that you have secured your domain name, it is time to go to our next section and choose the right Web Hosting. or you can go back to Free Website Help main page.