Blogs are a lot like websites in many respects.  In fact they are websites.  They require constant maintenance, a good design and layout and interesting content and topics to talk about. This is just for starters though.  There are many more things you can do to optimize your blog and send it on its way to success, but for now, I want to talk about something that is probably a lot more important for you to do as a new blogger, and that is coming up with a domain name for your new site.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?.  To tell your the truth, it could take you days to finally find a good domain name that suites your site.  A name that represents what your site is about and targets the right audience. Why you ask?…because all the ‘good ones’ are gone…or so you might think.

There are a lot of theories floating around out there about how long or short a domain name should be.  Some experts say that your domain name should be the name of your site, short so people can remember and spend less time typing it into their browser.  This also minimizes the possibility of making mistakes when typing it in.  I agree with all of this, but for me it is not set in stone.  You can have longer domain names that people can remember without jeopardizing your search results in the major search engines and worst yet, sending visitors to another site.  That would mean one loss sale for you that you cannot afford. Here are a few strategies you can use.

Think outside the box.  You have a creative side within you and it’s dying to come out.  After all, you did come up with the idea of starting a new blog and what it was going to be about.  Well that’s being creative, so let us begin. Get some pen and paper and write down what your blog is about.  Highlight key features from the content of your blog and write those down as well.  Begin to combine two to three word sentences that represent your blog.  For example, hypothetically speaking, if your blog is about unique characteristics of the biggest and most rare Apalician Dog, then your 2-3 word sentences might look something like this “rarest Apalician dog” or “the rare Apalician” or “biggest Apalician dog”.

You have just created a set of domain names. Ideally, if you can land one that just says ApalicianDog dot com that would be great, but if it is already taken or being used by another site, then resort to the creative ones you made up.  That’s fine, but even those can be taken as well sometimes but you don’t know that.  Here is how you find out.

Run your created domain names through the domain name registrar and see if they come back as being in use already.  You can typically find this service through your Web Hosting company and it’s free of charge. You get instant results back.  If it hasn’t been taken then congratulations.  If it has, the results will show you alternate names you can use, or use the same name with a different appendage for example,.org or .net instead of .com which are all fine.

Another strategy you can use is to buy existing domain names.  There are sites that actually sell aftermarket domain names,and sites that sell domain names that have been dropped.  Dropped domain names are names that website owners never bothered to renew or are no longer in use.  They become available for you to purchase. A quick search on the web will capture those websites for you.   Use these tips and tools and you will find a good domain name that is not necessarily “short”, but appropriate for your new blog.

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Did you know that 90% of achieving solid search engine rankings is dependent upon building quality one-way back links to your site?.  Building links is one thing, but to see any true effect, you have to build massive amounts of them. This process can be tedious and costly, and requires you to buy links in most cases to get high quality one-way back links. What about the sites requiring that you put a reciprocal link back on your site. If you agreed to do that every time someone requested it, before long, you will have a cluttered, dysfunctional website bombarded with so many links, you could not navigate your way around.

Another problem arises.  To find high quality back links to your site, sometimes require that you to go through hundreds of article directories, guest books, forums that are of high quality and other directories that have good page rank and some sort of relevance to your site, that will even allow you to put a link on their site.  Beginning to see the picture?  Here is a suggestion.

To help you with all those tedious tasks and improve your search engine optimization, use a link building service.  One that will literally eliminate the need for you to do your own link building search.  They work like this. They will take snippets of your unique content that are relevant to your site, and automatically disperse them across their huge network of blogs over time.  With time you will begin to see your traffic increase, building sales and your brand name.

I personally use a professional link building service that I am very happy with. They are highly networked and can have your site building one way links in no time.  The rewards are outstanding.  Go directly to their website here.