I find that a lot of people don’t give due consideration to their domain name yet a little careful planning could boost your online presence.

It has long been known that using important keywords in your domain name can add some weight to your search engine optimisation process. However, due to spamming over recent years, the importance has diminished, but there is still some worth in having a keyword rich domain.

A word of caution though – before going out and buying keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.com, you should try and keep the number of dashes to a maximum of 2. Lots of dashes in a domain name flags up the related website as a possible spammy site.

However, if you have a big brand already, you may get people entering your company name directly into the address box and append .com or .co.uk to it, so in that case you may be better choosing to have your company name as your domain name.

I find a good combination is to buy your company name and have it redirected to a more search engine friendly domain that includes your company name. That way you are helping to build your brand, but are also using a big keyword i.e. www.companyname-keyword1.co.uk.

However, before you all ruch out and buy new domains incorporating your brand and your major keyword, if you have a long held domain name, I would not advise changing your domain as it can have an effect on your search engine listings.