This weekend I will be creating a new blog! Its another topic that I like to talk about and all next week I will be talking about how I started my new blog and how I get traffic flowing right away to the blog. So this mini series will be called Blog StartUp and today is all about domain choosing.

Choosing a good domain name for your business website can be very hard but it is also essential to get it right, after all you want it to work for you.

With the meteoric rise of Internet use in the past 5 years, the importance of a “good” domain name has also increased. Domain names have become an essential component in the marketing arsenal of every business, and as such deserve more than just a passing consideration.

Why is a domain name so important? For one thing, a domain name can help you to get traffic to your website. If you don’t get traffic, you might as well not even have a website. There’s no doubt about it, if you want to make money, you need traffic.

But this process can be easily simplified by using this very unique tool on the internet called Bust a Name. What is bust a name all about?

The Service

Bust a Name is a tool to help you find domains and manage them. We have combined linguistic data with a unique interface to let you quickly search through thousands of domains and see which are available.

Why?

The project came about due to a clear need for a better way to find domains. Having launched many other web services, the hardest part was coming up with a domain name that wasn’t taken but could easily be memorized. We also realized that domain management was pretty difficult too. Bust a Name was created to try to fix both of these problems and help you manage web site related things easier.

How?

We are firm believers in using the right tool for the job. A good chunk of Bust a Name is written in front end javascript. The back-end is mostly rails, running with mysql and lighttpd for our web server.

This service is very clever because it will search domains for you by means of keywords. Let’s say you have a niche about gardening. All you have to do is enter a couple keywords about gardening and it will generate the possibilities of a domain base on your keywords! It is very simple. To gather more domains it will even add the additional ’s’ after your keywords and do its search. Optional.

Here is a small video about it and how the service works:

The point here is that your domain name should be descriptive of your business. After all, if you were looking for a new dentist, would you be likely to visit “thehistoryofdestistry.com” or “localareadentists.com”? While both are somewhat in the same niche, you really do not want to learn about the history of dentistry but you want to find a dentist in your local area.It is important that the name you give to your website will have the possibility of being found by somebody searching for an answer to their problem on the internet. If your dentist gave you a bad experience you may want to have a review website: localdentistreviews.com or dentalreviews.com.

This brings back to bust a name, choosing the right keyword for the system to generate your perfect domain. Keywords are very important especially for search engines. It identifies your site as being relevant to their inquiry, and it also helps search engine bots determine the relevance of your site. I use the Overture tool to decide what was the most popular search word was, but I was unable to retrieve a good dot com with the popular keywords. But in the end I received a good dot com (will announce the new blog next week).

Keywords are not enough, however. Simply stringing keywords together creates a very weak domain name. It tends to be cumbersome, and poorly remembered. Try to thing of a way to convey some value or description of your site, in as few words as possible. If you can create a short phrase, perhaps three words, including your keyword, then it will sound both memorable and natural.

I had fun with the Bust a Name website and it gave me a great domain name which I was surprise it was available. I registered the domain and this weekend I will be working on the new concept of my new blog.