Market Samurai has found a gold mine in the teaching of Kenny Goodman about choosing domain names. I’ve taken a few pointers from Kenny’s richer material. And yes, I wish I’d come across this a long time ago.

Note first that your domain name is a keyword and ranks as a keyword, whether as a broad, phrase, or exact match. If the searcher types in a keyword with a match to your domain name, an exact match, Market Samurai has found, seems to be a high playing card in the algorithm that ranks sites. Phrase and Broad match are also important, though proportionately less so.

The trouble is, most of the short tail keyword domain names are probably already taken in your niche, especially if the keyword has commercial value–meaning that people searching for that keyword are more likely to buy something directly associated with that keyword.

What to do? Two possibilities: (1) buy an existing domain name or (2) add a relevant prefix or suffix to the preferred short tail domain name. For example, choose “mybabytoys” or “babytoysreviews” if you can’t get “baby toys” — i.e., a broad or phrase match if you can’t get an exact match for a “baby toys” search.

With either possibility, Kenny would suggest buying an aged domain name instead of starting from ground zero with a new name so as to take advantage of the previous traffic building and ranking efforts of a former owner.

And the process of buying aged domain names introduces problems like how to find the names when they become available and how to recognize a good buy from a bad one. One does not want a domain name with a history of spamming or illegal activity. Or mere neglect or irrelevant content.

I suppose the bad news is that fishing for the best catch may take time and effort. The question is whether that is easier than starting to develop your new domain name’s online reputation from scratch.

Doing it the manual way, Kenny recommends checking the following auction sites for available names: Namejet.com, Snapnames.com, Afternic.com, Pool.com, Sedo.com, RickLatone.com, Bido.com, and Flippa.com. Kenny suggest making a bid 10 minutes before the deadline is ideal. Or sometimes one can find and contact site owners directly using Whois.net to make bids.

Once you have found a desirable name initially, check:
DomainTools.com – for domain name age
Archive.org – using the wayback machine for the history of domain names
Alexa.com & Compete.com – for an ideal of traffic and popularity
DMOZ.org & search.yahoo.com/dir – to see if listed
site:www.domainname.com – to find pages indexed on Google

Also check pagerank in browser with a browser application

Check for fake pagerank by typing in on Google “info:www.domainname.com” – if a different domain name shows up, it is forwarding to a higher pagerank domain and is thus fake.

In rare cases, trademarked domain names may cause you grief. In the US, check www.tess2.uspto.gov.

Or for a useful tool in the process, See Domain Samurai and/or join DN Forum.

1) Unless you are a big fish in a big pond, hunt for less popular keywords.

Using the Google adwords keyword tool in the “Descriptive words or phrases” section, you are more likely to find such words that have 150 to 2500 searches per month.

No, these Google results do not represent the whole picture, but they are a good benchmark.

2) Target keywords that are less competitive.

Do a Google search for any one particular keyword, and ideally the competing sites should be less than 10,000 near the upper right hand of the screen. In the image above, the results 26,900, are above the ideal … but not bad.

3) Use the Google Adwords keyword tool, Website Content section, for the site ranking highest in searches for related keyword ideas. The keywords generated are what Google considers relevant to the highest ranking site for the search you did.

4) Use each of your best keywords in their own article or blog post titles and once or twice in the body of your content.

Your blog posts and articles are more likely to rank well (Page Rank) if the titles contain keywords that have at least a moderate number of searches per month with a modest number of sites competing for the same keyword.

Further, the body of the article or blog post should have the keyword in it once or twice (do not overdo it) to tell the search engines and human readers that the title and content match.

Of course, the keywords should fit the context well. One keyword per article or blog post.

5) Use keywords as anchor texts in the resource boxes and biographical sections of your articles.

Most article directories have a separate section for the author to place self-serving information that may also be helpful to the reader.

Use the keyword as the text on which the reader may click. This helps search engines and human readers know what is relevant to the content of your article and to the site or page that will appear if the human user clicks the link.

… In which case, you should make the anchor text keyword relevant to your article and the page that shows up when the reader clicks the link.