Before you continue reading this post please read the following post:

Where should you begin with online marketing & SEO?

Now you have that finished let's begin with the basics.

Step 1) Picking a domain name:
The search engines will give you credit for having keywords in your domain. My main site is (www.alabamahuntsville.net), the primary keywords for my area are Huntsville Alabama Real Estate and Huntsville Alabama. I know the domain is reversed but it still works.If you google the words in the link above you will find my website in the top five.

You can also google Condos and find (www.condosandresorts.com) in the top 10. The words are very important. I also have (www.huntsvillealabamarealestate.net), for now it just has some junk parked on it. It ranks in the top 100 somewhere. This will become a focus at a later time. I am letting the domain age until I am ready to work on it.

Note: Being clever with your domain isn't very helpful for search terms. You want to target a keyword phrase. I just built a site for some friends and finding a domain for a real estate site was hard, but we settled on (www.HuntsvilleHomesToday.com). They are not looking to drive traffic at this point but I am making sure I take care of their site the way I would my own.

Go to a 'keyword search tool' on digitalpoint.com or on seobook.com or overture. Any of these can provide you with results. If you are looking in an area, such as I did, type in city and state as the term. The terms will return search term quantities for cars, the city website, maybe the chamber of commerce and etc. When you get the list copy it into a spreadsheet. This way you can eliminate the inforation you don't need. Focus on the higher quantity terms. We can talk about the lower quantity terms later. They are important in th overall process.

When you find the main terms you can begin the search for the right domain. I use Godaddy because they are cheap and easy to use. You can go to many places and search for domains. Don't get frustrated, it is likely, the really good domains are already gone. However, you can add one simple word on the end and get really close; such as www.HuntsvilleHomesToday.com. We would prefer to have HuntsvilleHomes but it has been gone for a long time.

In my next post we will discuss where to go from here.