You may not have given much thought to the domain name you chose for your website, but if you have, you’ll realise it’s an important decision. Choose wisely and both your visitors and the search engines will find you easily.

Suppose you have decided to build a website about European train journeys because you now sell European tours. What would you choose as a domain name? First you need to look at your content.

What are you planning to put on the home page? How will you think about your site? Will it have a historic focus? Are you selling budget tours? What’s the angle? Compile a shortlist of words to describe it’s essence.

Then, if you don’t already have it, download and install the free keyword research tool, good keywords, and type in the shortlist of words you compiled. Which words have the highest search counts? These are the words you should use in your domain name.

Domain names can be up to 67 characters long, so you can choose a good descriptive name, such as europeantrainjourneys.com. This could be a good choice for both the search engines and your visitors. It contains the popular, searched-for words and is easy for your visitor to remember.

You will need to choose your extension. For our example, you might choose europeantrainjourneys.eu as this is a site on European travel. Most people want .com, the most popular choice and the default for web browsers too. But the combination of words you want may be taken already. If so, you could choose .net, .org, .info, .biz. or a country top level domain.

The TLD or Top Level Domains are usually .com or the country domains, like uk. But you can now select an SLD or Second Level Domain as well, which widens your choice. If you are building a UK site, Nominet explains the rules.

Once you have a shortlist of choices, betterwhois will tell you if the name you want is available and can register the name for you. Try godaddy if you want inexpensive registration and some help choosing a name.

Like many things, it’s a compromise. You want to choose a name that is easy to remember but contains popular keywords or phrases, that isn’t already taken. But you can still be lucky.