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Choosing a Good URL for Your Site

Assuming you are setting up a web site the goal of which is to earn some money, it is important to choose a good URL that will attract visitors. The other end of the spectrum is a family site or blog to let friends or others in the family know what you are doing and post some photos, for example. In that case you can choose anything for a URL and just get the word out to the small number of people who will have interest in your content. But if you want to attract as many people as possible so that they will do something on the site to earn you some money, such as making a purchase or clicking on an advertisement that pays you something, you need to be very careful about the URL you choose. In fact this is probably the most important consideration for a web site that you intend to monetize.

In short, you need to pick a URL that is a key word phrase that generally describes the subject of your web site. You want a key word phrase that has a reasonable number of daily searches, and you need a phrase that can be purchased as a URL. In other words you need a URL that someone else does not already own. Having a URL that no one searches for will get you nowhere, and obviously if you cannot even purchase that URL you are not even on first base.

The Google key word tool is excellent for this type of investigation, which is commonly referred to as key word research. There are lots of software tools on the market you can purchase to help you with key word research, some more expensive than others. If you are new at setting up web sites the best advice is to just use the free Google key word tool. In fact many experienced marketers just use the free Google tool, because the other packages use data from Google to get their results. After all, it is Google that knows how many searches that have occurred each month.

If you have a pet shop, for example, choosing a URL like johnnyspetshop.com is only sensible if you are trying to establish the brand name “johnnys pet shop”. You need to remember that nobody is going to do a web search for that specific term unless the business is well known and the brand is established. You will probably do better with austinpetshop.com, or something like that, because people in Austin will probably search on that term.

We’ll continue with an example about how to proceed in another article on this site.