Choosing a good domain name isn't always so simple.

So you require a domain name for your brand new online business. You might even have some cool ideas for a new domain name combination that will really impress your friends. Question is, is your new domain name going to help your business or hurt it?

What could be simpler than choosing a domain name right? Wrong. There are numerous things you want to consider and research before you register your preferred domain name.

First off, what's a domain name and why would I need one?

A domain name makes our lives much easier when browsing the net. You see, all computers online are actually referenced with what's called IP addresses. On the world wide web, IP addresses are four sets of numbers that function just like street addresses allowing two computers to talk over a network. An example of an IP address is the one for Google.com. It is 216.239.39.99. If you enter this IP address into the address bar of your browser it will bring you to Google's home page at that very same way that typing http://www.google.com will get you there.

Unfortunately, we humans have trouble remembering our phone numbers let alone so many digits for all sorts of sites. That is one of the key reasons domains were invented.

Domain names make it simple for us humans to remember how to locate a website. Most individuals understand Google.com and anyone familiar with the internet knows that to reach Google, you just type http://www.google.com on your address bar and you're transported to their site. The same is true for Disney.com, Microsoft.com, CNN.com, etc.. .

Now you'd think that picking a domain name would just be a matter of choosing something that's unique and that people would remember. The issue with this approach is that the majority of us do not have the money required to turn our name into a new name on the mass market. The majority of us have to rely on our prospects attaining our site through other means. The best of them are search engines.

Selecting a good domain name for your website begins with the primary key words you have chosen to concentrate on for your site. Before you start your business, you should conduct some preliminary research online to find out which keywords have the most traffic and also the least number of other sites competing for that specific keyword. Some tools which help in this are the Overture keyword suggestion tool and Wordtracker.com. Both these tools will provide you a general idea of how much traffic each of your chosen keywords will probably get monthly. This helps to ascertain which keywords to focus on.

Should you opt for a domain name that includes your most important keywords?

Typically, the answer is yes. Google and to some degree Yahoo equally provide you a little boost to your domain name. If your domain name happens to include your targeted keywords, your domain name can help you in your quest for higher search engine rankings. Now in case you do everything else wrong, having your most important keywords in your domain name won't magically direct you to the top of the listings. A number of other parts of your website must be working for you too. Other things you can do to improve rankings are beyond the scope of this report.

Picking a keyword rich domain is a wise business move.

For some websites, it might be the edge they need to move up a couple of places in the search engines. When choosing a keyword rich domain name, you might want to think about hyphens between your key words. A good example is cheap-airline-tickets. com. Current research trends for Google and Yahoo imply that hyphens are the only means to separate keywords inside a URL that will provide you a rankings boost.

Why not just choose your organization name? Simple. Is your company a household name? Are you dominant in a class that people have stopped referring to the generic title of your class and use your name like Kleenex has for tissue paper? If so, register your organization name. Otherwise, register a keyword rich domain where possible.

You might be thinking,"But I already have a domain name which is my name. Should I go and register a new domain and point it to the exact same website? The brief answer is no. Years ago, you could improve your rankings on search engines by simply setting up lots of doorway pages and having them all link back to your own home page with all sorts of domain names. That strategy nowadays can backfire. You're better off optimizing individual pages within your current website than you're making a whole lot of"fluff" websites merely to increase rankings.

The technique I suggest above is really best suited to new business ventures. If you still haven't registered your domain name for that exceptional online business you're about to begin, then make it keyword rich wherever possible. In case you have already established your business, you'll just have to make the most of the information next time you begin another online venture.