Domain Name Suggestion Tools And Methodology
In our last post, we talked about the importance of a good domain name for the purposes of SEO and SEM. We also defined what a “good” domain name actually means with regard to search traffic. With that as our foundation, today I wanted to discuss a proven methodology I use for coming up with good domain names to attract organic search traffic. You might recall that, with respect to the natural search results, a good domain name is one that is keyword rich — that is, it contains all or part of a high volume search keyword in its name. Here’s how I find names like this…
It starts with keyword research. You can use a myriad of keyword tools for this, but I usually just use the Google keyword tool. I put in what I think are the top “head” keywords for my website and let Google give me additional suggestions. Note, in order to maximize the number of keywords and keyword suggestions returned, it is best to only type in one head keyword at a time. So if you have 3 different head keywords for your site/niche, you’d do this 3 separate times.
Once Google has returned my results, I sort the output by Global Search Volume – this shows you the keywords with the highest global search volume at the top. Now save the output to a text file or a CSV file (scroll all the way down for the option to do so). Once you’ve saved off the output(s), you need to get the keywords into domain name form. There are essentially two things that need to be done to make this happen – first, any keyword phrase must be concatenated so that any spaces are removed. Second, the .COM, .NET, and .ORG character extensions should be appended to the end of each keyword.
Obviously all of this can be done manually, but there are faster ways too. One tool I use to help me here is a freeware tool called Text Magician. Using Text Magician, you can choose the “Remove Text From Everywhere Option” (that text being a single space) to concatenate the keywords. You can also use this same tool to append the TLD extensions – just use the “Add text to the end of each line” option to do so, specifying “.com”, “.net”, and “.org” (without quotes, 3 separate times). Incidentally, Text Magician is an indispensable tool in my arsenal for a number of reasons – perhaps I’ll do a future post just on all the ways and reasons I use it. Anyway, at this point, you should have a list of domain names that are ready to be pasted into a bulk domain registration search tool.
A bulk domain registration search tool is one that allows you to paste multiple domain names into a form to check availability. While there are a number of options here, I personally like Namecheap as a registrar and so I use their bulk tool (though they don’t allow more than 30 domain names to be searched at a time). But once you’ve pasted in all of your keyword-rich domain names and let the tool run its course, simply save off the output (copy and paste) and analzye which domain names are available for the taking. You’ll want to register a .COM if possible, but if there is a juicy keyword domain name with a .NET or .ORG available, don’t be afraid to register that as well.
That’s the methodology I use to find keyword rich domain names for SEO. Now let’s say you just want to spot check the availability of a few domain names you’ve brainstormed. In this case, it may be faster to just lookup those specific domain names. The fastest way I know to do that is to use a domain name suggestion tool called Domize. It’s a fairly self-explanatory tool, and I definitely encourage you to check it out (warning though, you can end up wasting a lot of time there since it’s so fun and easy to use!). Another older domain name suggestion tool is Nameboy – this one literally suggests possible domains for you based on the primary and secondary words you input. A valuable tool, but I generally use Domize exclusively these days.
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