A lot of people feel that choosing a good domain name is easy to do, simply choose your business name as the web site URL. This option is most of the time true and for most brick and mortar businesses the best option. But unless you business name is rich in the keywords your target customers are looking for you are not likely going to rank very easily on the search engines. Most of the time I suggest someone looking to rank high in search engines to use a keyword rich domain name. But there are a few things you need to consider which I will discuss in this article.

I have written a few articles on SEO or Search Engine Optimization and I have discussed many tactics and techniques you can use to help your site rank better in the search engines. But I have seen way to many sites with keyword rich domain names and very little or no content rate in the top 5 of search engines. So I always suggest purchasing a keyword rich domain name to help you along and there are a few rules you have to understand about the search engines. Search engines DO NOT like multiple domains redirecting to a single website because it creates double or even triple posting in the search engine results. If you purchase multiple domains and link them all back to your main one that can be considered link farming and that is not good in terms of SEO and you could lose rankings on Google. The best way to handle multiple domains all going to the same place is to use a 301 redirect.

First lets talk about how to choose the domains we want to purchase. You should hopefully know a set of keywords that your target audience would be searching for. Normally you would spend a lot of time searching other sites for available domain names that are keyword rich. But there is a free site that will actually to all of this for you. Just head over to this great little site Domain Whiz for domain suggestions. It can be used for domain name suggestion, domain name ideas, and domain name brainstorming. This site will then give you a great list of keyword rich domain names that are available and domains that are taken. Domain Whiz will also provide you with a Who Is link on taken domains so you can see who owns them and if they are for sale by a private party. Once you find the domain you want click price check and you will be taken to where you can purchase the domain. Another great feature of Domain Whiz is that in their search listings they show you how many monthly searches have been done for those particular keywords in the specific domain name. This allows you to find the right domain name that also has a high number of monthly searches.

Now that you have found and purchased your domain we need to move everything from the old domain to the new domain and create a redirect on the old domain. We simply need a single index.html file on the old domain with one of the follow snipets of code depending on which scripting you are using.

PHP:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP .NET:

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP:

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

CGI:

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/”);

So that is it we have just redirected your old domain to your new keyword rich domain. Just as a reminder your old domain will stop showing up in google searches but your new domain should hopfully be showing up in more searches with relivant keywords.