Choosing Just The Right Name
By: Gayla Baer
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Choosing just the right name for your blog or website should require as much care and thought as naming your firstborn child.
When looking for the perfect name for your journal, you’ll want to take into consideration several factors.
First being search terms.
I like to use Overture (although it seems that Overture is stuck in February of this year, it still helps in determining most searched terms) to see what titles might be more search engine friendly before making my final decision. I will use the term Diets as my example here:
When looking at Overture the word Diets itself shows that word has been searched 350268 times. That’s a LOT and would seem like a nice choice for a name on your blog, but when you take that same term over to Yahoo or Google to see how many sites you’d have to compete with on that term you can see you’ll face quite the challenge in search engine ranking which in turn means you’ll have to work harder and become better with information than the sights that are ranking higher.
Diets on Yahoo shows you’ll have approximately 31,200,000 sites and on Google you face 17,300,000. So you might want to look at something a little less searched and less of a challenge to give you better odds of ranking quicker.
For example when you check overture for the search term diet, look a little further down the list and you’ll find search terms like vegetarian diet with an estimated 8000 searches – a little better odds. You might even want to increase your odds a bit more and go with crash diet with about 5000 searches.
One thing I’d highly recommend is when you do choose your site that you keep that little tool on Overture close at hand. Save it to your favorites and visit it often. When you aren’t sure what to name your entries or posts, pop over there and snag one of the search terms and incorporate it into your writing.
So back to choosing a name – given the stats that we’ve just viewed you might want to consider something like Crashdiet – Crash-diet-addict or something to that effect. Hyphens are ok, but try to avoid them whenever you can. Also make sure to use that term in the description of your site upon signing up for your blogger blog.
That’s how I’ve managed to name my blogs.
Now a question for MomGadget Readers:
How do you name your blogs? What tools do you use that helps you determine what name is most suitable or do you just take a simple shot in the dark?
Tags: blogging, weblog, naming a blog, domain names
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- Earning Money with MyLot
- Randa Clay – Among The Leaders of The I Follow Movement
- Related Search Ads – Affiliate Marketing Just Got Better
- Blog Tops the list of hated Internet words
April 18, 2007 Filed under MomGadget
Hi Gayla
This is useful information, thanks.
Congratulations on winning the site makeover at emoms. I can’t wait to see the redesign. Will you be doing it for this site, or one of your others?
All the best
Yvonne
Grow Your Writing Business
Since you asked . . .
I went with Scribbit because I wanted a unique name, one that sounded fun and simple and different. I didn’t want anything relative to moms or motherhood because there are so many and they’re so hard to remember. I liked Scribbit because it reminded me of scribbling, scribes, Scrabble–writing. That’s more my focus than my motherhood.
Plus, I think that if you don’t host your own domain (I’m with blogspot) a unique name makes it easier for people to find you. If you type in scribbit or scrabbit or scribit or scribet or any other variety on the name I’m the whole page of results. So it works for me.
As you can probably tell, I made no efforts with keywords in my blog’s name!
I wanted something memorable (though it still may be a bit long for that) and interesting. When it comes down to SEO, I’ll let my title tags, pretty permalinks and use of header elements to drive the traffic.
Lots of good tips here Gayla- nice post.
Yvonne ~ Thanks! I was surprised I won too. As for which site? I’m not sure yet. There are a couple I could use a face lift on — but it won’t be MomGadget. Too much blood, sweat and tears have gone into this one over the last few months to throw it all down the drain. It’s the OCD thing I’ve got going on.
Michelle ~ I wondered where you got Scribbit from. I thought maybe it had something to do with kids and toads. Guess it’s that mom thing I’ve got going on lol — I do like it though. It is surprisingly easy to remember.
Phil ~ How has that method of SEO worked for you?
Randa ~ Thanks! I’m a little disappointed to find that Overture is taking a nose dive. I heard they are doing away with it. I’d sure like to find a site that’s similar to Overture Keywords Tool. I’ve used that little puppy a LOT over the years.
Ensuring keywords are in your page titles (ie the <title> element), permalinks and important headers (<h1> and <h2>) on the page certainly works for targetted traffic to specific posts. I get over half my visits from Google (hardly see other search engines though!) so it must be working somewhat.
Do you think expanding on what I’m saying here in a post would help?
Phil ~ I just sent you an email.
I think expanding on this topic would help quite a few people who just aren’t getting the tagging, keywords aspect of blogging 
I’ll do my best, got a busy weekend coming up though! I’ll squeeze out a post early next week…
hi, i had added ur blog as my technorati favourties pleas add min
my url is
http://technorati.com/blogs/http%3A%2F%2Fsanta-reviews.blogspot.com
Have you tried Wordtracker? It’s expensive, but I think much more useful. This is a good comparison of Overture and Wordtracker:
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/wordtracker-overture.html