Choosing a good domain name
Remember, it's all about keywords! A keyword phrase in a domain name can have a positive impact on search engine ranking - after all, why would you have a name like "ideas-for-marketing.com" if you weren't concerned about marketing ideas? The impact of a keyword-d domain is probably not as great as some people think, but it can't do any harm.
However, don't forget the offline world too. It isn't just about Google ranking and your overall marketing may be better served by using a memorable name or your organisation / brand name.
If you are a business organisation, then you should try to obtain a .com domain name or if you are targeting a geographical area, then the appropriate TLD - eg .co.uk or .de. Why - because .com domains will rank more highly. As simple as that. It is also worth bearing in mind that a significant number of people will remember your domain as ending .com (after all dotcom is synonymous with the internet) and so you may be generating business for whoever owns the .com version of your domain.
Your name can only be alphanumeric. No spaces. My preferred approach is to use hyphens to separate words. Underline characters are not regarded as spaces by search engines. Google can identify words within words but may not give the same ranking to a word.
How important is Domain Age
One factor that does have an enormous impact on ranking is the age of a domain. If you look at the top ranking sites in this image (click for a larger view), the DA (Domain Age) column shows the number of years since the domain was registered.
The average age of these top-ranking domains is 7 years-old and none are younger than 2 years-old. So what can you do if domain age is so important? Buy a domain!
Some domain names simply lapse and if you are quick enough you can buy these and benefit from their page rank. There are also people who make their living "flipping" domains. They choose keyword-optimised domains and build their page rank and then sell them. Unlike most market-places, second-hand goods actually cost more. Think of a wine maker laying down his bottles for a few years whilst the wine matures and increases in value.
There are specialist sites where you can buy domains. Be careful because Page Rank can dissolve if a domain is dormant for too long or the site content changes dramatically. For this reason, many domains will be sold with complete websites, allowing you to adapt and introduce your content slowly.
Achieving page rank can take a lot of work and for many people the earlier revenues that they can achieve from ranking higher sooner more than outweigh the cost of the domain name purchase.
Useful Page Rank Tools
The Google Toolbar is a useful tool in its own right if you have a Google account. It also has a button that will display the page rank for the current page.
If you use Firefox, there are a couple of very useful add-ons:
The SEO for Firefox add-on adds SEO data to the Google search results page. This can be particularly useful when trying to find high ranking sites that may provide backlinks or that you wish to analyse to discover what they are doing right.
Click on the image on the left to see a screenshot.
The second add-on is called SearchStatus and provides you with SEO analysis of the current page. Right-click on the page and you can see its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google and Linkscape), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa and Compete), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.
