Step 1 – Choose a Name:
These days I’ve gone down the route of choosing names that “do what they say on the tin”. What I mean by that is a name that conveys the business in one read e.g. I provide media production services and I’m based in Brighton, hence Media Brighton. I figure that most of my business is going to come from people finding my site in the search engines. Therefore choosing a name that contains some of the keywords I will be targeting later, should help in the optimisation of my site, in the long run.

Before sticking with a name for my new site I perform a few checks. First and probably most obvious is checking I can buy the domain in either .com, .co.uk or .net formats. If you’re relying on most of your traffic coming to your site mainly from search engines it’s ok to go with a hyphenated name. E.g. media-brighton.com
Search engines actually see words that are hyphenated as separate keywords (keep this in mind when naming your pages, more on this later).

Assuming the domain is available the next thing to check is how many people are searching for that keyword phrase. You can use Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool for this. Enter your proposed name and press the button. The tool will display statistics for this and other phrases. What you want to see is the average search volume per month. The other thing to take into consideration is the advertiser competition. The higher the advertiser competition the harder it will be to rank highly for that key phrase. The higher the average search volume, the more people will be searching for that phrase every month. As you can see with Media Brighton the advertiser competition is quite low (around 2/10) and the average search volume is relatively high at 2,900. Remember you don’t need to have really high search volumes to get a lot of traffic to your site as you will be targeting different keywords for the different pages and once you add all the search volumes together then you end up with a higher search volume. Also if your keyword is saying “Not enough data” then you know that no-body is searching for that term.

Anchor text for back linking
Another reason for using keywords in your name is anchor text. Search engines like sites that have a lot of inbound links. The text that is made into a link will help the rating of the link if the anchor text contains the keyword or phrase that your site is optimised for. So for example click here to see what Media Brighton does wouldn’t be as good as click here to see what Media Brighton does. The later link example will be more powerful giving more SEO juice to the link and making my site better optimised for the phrase “Media Brighton”. If your site name contains the keyword phrase then even if people make a link http://www.mediabrighton.com then you will have good anchor text within your link.

In the next article I’ll be covering planning and building a site with SEO in mind.