I talked the other day about naming a blog or product.  Going back to this issue of naming, consider the matter of domain names.  A great domain name can be a huge boon to your traffic.  When search engines sort their entries, their aim is to provide the most relevant results possible to the end user.  Their algorithms take a number of factors into account, including things like how many other pages link to that site, and how high-ranked those sites are (the ones linking in).  (The thinking is that if a lot of good sites are linking to it, it is probably also a good site.)  One big factor, though, is a site’s domain name.

Google, Yahoo, and the others all assume that, for instance, insurancespecialists.com is going to be about insurance.  So it should be highly relevant to people searching for insurance.  Titus2homemaker.com should be very relevant to those searching for “titus 2 homemaker”  (I’m the number one result.)  or “titus 2” “homemaker” (again, number one).  So, if you can use one or more of your primary keywords in your domain name, that will give you an automatic boost in the search engines.  (Obviously, though, use good judgment.  It’s probably better to have a non-keyword domain name that fits than a domain name that’s a random string of keywords.  Be sure it makes sense!)

Now, the hard work is still to come.  I’m that number one result for those terms in the search engines, but I have a pretty high bounce rate.  🙁  If you want to keep your traffic, it’s still necessary to produce good content that’s what people are looking for and, apparently, I’m not very good at that (yet!).

If you’ve had a blog for a while, and it’s growing steadily, I probably wouldn’t recommend suddenly renaming everything.  But if you’re just getting started, that’s another little tip to keep in mind as you plan your site.