The name of your blog is very important. It’s the first thing people usually hear about your blog and greatly affects their first impression.
When you’re ready to start a blog and choose a name there are 5 things you should keep in mind.
Before you settle on a name for your blog you need to make sure the matching domain name is available. You definitely do not want a different domain name as this will confuse people and send your traffic to another similar website instead.
Ideally, you will be able to get the .com domain extension for your site since this is the most common and memorable extension. Also, it’s a good idea to get all of the other available extensions so no one else does in the future.
If the .com is taken, but a .org or a .net are still available then you may want to choose another name. That being said, there is no difference with a .org site for instance, but it is not as popular or memorable, that’s all.
You will probably have to come up with a long list of potential names before you find a good one that is available to register.
The shorter the name the better. Short domain names are easier to remember than long ones and are easier to type. This makes things easier for everyone.
Shorter domain names are also better for search engine optimization. The search engines don’t like really long domain names because they are usually and indicator of a spam site. For instance, a marketer may buy the domain name freecheapwordpressthemesbuy.com. Having keywords in your domain will help you rank for them, but the aforementioned domain name is too much and will thus get penalized.
Choosing a unique domain name will help your site standout from the very start. However, there is a good way to do unique and a bad way.
If you decide to make up a word for your name then make sure it is logical how it is spelled. Otherwise it will be harder for people to successfully find your site.
Contrarily, don’t choose a boring and unmemorable domain like blogmarketingtips.com. There’s nothing wrong with that name, but it’s pretty boring and lackluster.
Before you finalize your decision for a blog name, you may want to consider including a keyword in it. You can do keyword research easily with Google’s Keyword Tool. If you want to keep it very simple, just include a niche specific term and that will go a long ways.
For instance, if you were starting a blog about fishing could call it fishingwithjohn.com or something like that. Having the word “fishing” in the domain would help that site rank with more ease for fishing keywords and search queries.
It’s important that your blog name is memorable and sticks in people’s minds. A good way to test the memorability of your name before buying the domain is to test it on another person.
Talk to a friend about the blog you’re going to start and near the beginning of the conversation tell them the name of the site. After speaking with them for a couple minutes, ask them if they remember the name of the site.
If they have no idea then you may want to switch the name. Otherwise you probably have a decent name on your hands.
With your knowledge of picking a killer blog name and how to start a website, there should be nothing left between you and your future blogging success.