Domain names are names assigned to represent, identify and distinguish your website space from that of others. Domain names are unique and consist of a name you choose and an extension such as .com, .org etc. depending on what kind of firm you wish to represent. or which location you are based in.

Getting a domain name itself is quite simple, you simply access one of thousands or domain name registrars or web site hosting firms on the Internet, do a search to confirm that the name you want to use has not already been used by someone else, pay your money and register it, usually for just few dollars.

That is the easy part. The harder part is choosing a good domain name in the first place. Your natural tendency could be to choose one that reflects your company name. Another might be to choose the wackiest, zaniest name you can think of so your company can stand out.

This is okay if you are a large company, or have a lot of money to invest in marketing and promotions. If however, like most small businesses building their websites on the Internet, you have a limited budget, you may want to consider carefully choosing a domain name that reflects a very narrow niche of products you wish to market i.e. you may need to very precisely and selectively target your market. A good website name should provide a good description of what services of goods your website offers.

The Internet is a huge marketplace, but conversely there is also huge competition on the Internet for the top positions in the search engines.

Most people carrying out a search on the Internet never get past the first few pages before giving up or changing their search terms to find something more.

If, for example you plan to sell Doll's Houses - and you type the term "doll's houses" on Google (the World's biggest and most popular search engine) - you will get back more than 5 million results. In essence you are competing with more than 5 million competitors for the top few positions in Google.

So is there any hope for small business website builders? Yes, there is, because firstly Google does not rank websites, but individual website pages so even if your home page is not highly ranked, other pages on your website can get top ranking for similar topics.

Secondly, you have the opportunity to beat your opposition because you can specialise and therefore reduce the competition. This is where your choice of domain name comes in.

Normally search engines match the terms people are searching for to similar words (known as keywords) on your website to determine how relevant your website is to their searches.

However, in addition to this, the major search engines also match the relevance of your domain name to the keywords - hence in that search we just did for dolls houses - the dollshouse domain comes up first. But if you sell dolls houses, you can make your website domain more specific than that. What kind of dolls houses do you sell? Which niche in your industry do you cater to?

It is better for you to choose a more descriptive domain name, which has the effect of both limiting your target market and reducing competition. You might think it is a bad thing to reduce your target market, but this is not actually so. You might decide to call your site woodendollshouses, giantdollshouses, miniaturedollshouses etc.

Someone looking for a giant dolls house is highly unlikely to also be looking for a miniature dolls house, so targeting a more specific audience will lead to you receiving traffic that is far more interested in your sites content rather than getting visitors who pay a visit to your website and leave quickly (bounce) because your site is not relevant to their needs.

There are other factors one can optimise, so the most specific name may not always come first. But making your domain name relevant to your main topic and specialising it so that is becomes the most relevant to capture a niche is an important way to get noticed on the Internet and build your website traffic.

Fortunately, it is not all guess work to determine exactly which keywords people are actually using for searches in your particular realm. There are both free and paid for tools that will help you find which keywords people are searching for, how popular the terms are and even how many searches are being done for these keywords.

You can easily find the best keywords to base your domain name on. Since your domain name is the one thing about your website you can't change without having to start all over again, make sure you get hold of one of these tools and do some good research before you even consider buying your domain. Then you will find it much easier to get your website to rise to the top ranks of the search engines and profit from increased website traffic.