The Blog Plan: The Secret to Picking a Blog URL

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The Secret to Picking a Blog URL

Your blog URL is your brand. It's what sticks you out from the crowd. As soon as you choose a blog name, you really don't want to change it.

The very first thing I did with The Blog Plan was to decide which keywords I will aim to rank high for on Google.

The key to picking your blog URL is a few simple steps.

1. Know What Your Niche is

You need a niche, don't kid yourself on this. I started out with "Don't you tell me what to do, you stupid blog-o-sphere, I am going to blog about whatever I like!"

My Dad blog went in all different directions. I had several niches in the one blog. This doesn't lead to a great amount of followers/subscribers.

I eventually led towards talking a lot about what it is like to be a dad and decided I needed to write solely about that.

Understand your niche, then you can take on the next part.

2. Find Important Keywords

You want to rank high in Google, so you need to find important keywords so you can improve your ranking.

If your blog is going to be about Photography, you know that photography is your keyword.

Using Google's Keyword Tool, type in photography and you get the following:

83.1 million times the word photography is searched for every month. Landing top rank on that keyword would really get the traffic rolling in!

But landing this position is a dream. It may be possible a long long way down the blogging track, but highly doubtful.

What you then do is define your keyword to a narrower target. Lets say, your passion is Australian photography.

40,500 searches per month. That looks much more attainable. Also, look at the competition for the keyword. Not too bad!

Adding a few more keywords can also improve your chances of finding a keyword with low competition.

The lower the competition for unique keywords, the better your chances are at ranking high in Google.

3. Try to Use Your Keywords as the URL

Once you've found your keywords, try to incorporate them into your URL. AusPhotography.net.au ranks at number one in Google for 'Australian photography' partly because the keywords are part of the actual URL.

4. Make it Awesome

If your blog is about making money online, don't be lame and call your site MakingMoneyOnline.blogspot.com.

Make it Awesome! Yes, incorporate your keywords to help your Google ranking, but make it something you will be proud of.

So if your blog is about making money online, call it OnlineMoneyNerd.com or something like that. You want to stand out as well as incorporate your keywords.

Why is it important

Google is the biggest search engine online today, probably will be the biggest for many years to come. You want to rank as high as possible to reach an audience of viewers from around the world. Simply dropping links on other people's blogs doesn't work as well as hitting the numero uno spot for a certain keyword. Even landing on the first page is good.

How to increase your Google ranking? That is a question that will probably take me several posts to answer. Hopefully over the coming posts I can help to answer that one.

Tips to remember

You don't have to include your niche keywords into your URL. It does help, but you can get rank high without doing it. Although it does help Google ranking to have a keyword as part of your URL, it's not essential. My daddy blog sits on the first page of Google (depending on the day you look) with only my name in the URL (torkona.blogspot.com), so there are other ways of ranking if you aren't comfortable with this method.
Even though a keyword or phrase may have no competition, it might be unattainable. Try ranking for a keyword like 'Google' or 'Yahoo' and you'll understand, there is no way of beating Google for the number one page ranking!
99% of the time your first choice for URL will be taken, so have a few names in mind.

What tips do you have for picking a blog URL? What has worked for you in the past or is currently working for you now?

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