Developing a website is complex. There are many variables you have to take into account. One of the first BIG decisions you will have to make is choosing a good domain name. One tip to keep in mind with domain names is to keep your domain name as simple as possible. You also want your domain name to be easy to remember and meaningful. Make it relate to your websites topic as much as you can.

Try to avoid free domains hosted by large corporate sites like Blogger. Sure they cost nothing, but the search engines do not like them nearly as much as they do private domain names. Even if your site is recognized by the search engines, a professional domain name that you own is likely to get more attention from and be more trusted by your prospective customers.

Now I am not saying that you should not use free sites like Blogger. Setting up a blog on those free sites that is keyword optimized for your target niche and points back to your main site is an excellent way to increase your sites page rank and drive free traffic to it. What I am saying is that you should not rely on the free sites as your primary domain.

Frankly it just does not look professional.

It is not expensive to register a domain name. You can register domains for less than $10 per year. When choosing your domain name try to get one of your keywords in it, this can increase your ranking with some search engines. When picking your domain you can try various ways of formatting it. For instance: ‘MyDomainName.com' could also be ‘My-Domain-Name.com' or ‘MyDomain-Name.com'.

Play around with the formatting of the domain name until you find a style you find appealing. In some cases it might even make since to reverse the word order of your domain. For instance you could try something like ‘Name-My-Domain.com.' Changing the order up may not help you with exact phrase searches, but it can still capture the broad searches.

You might also choose to establish more than one domain name using keywords and then link your ‘doorway' domain sites to your primary site. But you will have to pay for each of the domain names and also the monthly hosting fees: If you really want to incorporate this technique into your business model search for a discount host that allows you to have unlimited domains and sub-domains.

The benefit of setting up these doorway sites is that you can target a large number of keywords that relate to your main site. For instance if your main site targeted used books you could have doorway sites that target related keywords like ‘used-book-reviews.com' or ‘best-used-book-source.com.'

Keep in mind that some search engines disregard ‘doorway' sites. Put some unique content that you wrote on your 'doorways,' it does not have to be much but try to make it original. One tactic I like to use is to have the front page of the doorway site be an original article that links back to my website. Then to keep my website fresh I put a link called ‘blog' in an out of the way spot on the page. I make this link as hidden as possible without actually hiding it. Then I have the posts on that page auto-update via RSS. This way the search engines always see fresh activity happening on the website.