A major key to ranking high on a search engine is all about the domain name. Have you chosen the right domain name? Think like your customers, what are they looking for to find you. Think back to the beginning when you were sitting in front of the internet for the first time trying to find something you really needed. You used simple keywords. That’s where your mind needs to be when you choose a domain name.

Here’s my personal experience. I’m looking for work as a WordPress designer (designing themes) and I live near Charlotte. When I looked at Indeed for work, I was always putting in ‘graphic designer’, ‘web designer’ or ‘WordPress designer’ and I was looking for those jobs in/near Charlotte.

After lots of applications to companies and never getting a positive email response, I started thinking like someone who needed a website or needed a redesign. And when I did a search for ‘Charlotte WordPress Designer’, lots of businesses in Charlotte came up related to those keywords but never a domain name with those keywords.

Therefore, I saw there was alot of competition and those companies had become popular by possibly word-of-mouth, good business, good SEO or a press release. So then, how does one small company rise in PageRank above the competition without spending lots of money on advertising?

If you are a well-established company, use your company’s name as the domain. If you’re a freelancer (does not mean we work for free), then choose a domain name that matches the job you want or which search results you want to be found within. Don’t exceed 20 letters before the ‘.com’ and make sure to register your new domain name for five or ten years, depending on what you can afford.

Because I chose the most-searched-for keywords for my domain name, and that’s the work I’m skilled with, I was able to rise above the competition. If I didn’t do anything more, I could stay at the top of the search results for six months and within those six months I’d move from third place on the second page of results, to seventh and third on the first page of results (within Google).

Now you have that honored position on the first page, how do you keep it? You need to build a community of readers on your website. And that’s done by writing posts for a blog. Whether you get comments or not, you should write once every two weeks at the least to keep people coming back for more and don’t ever give up. Your blog is where you share your technical skills, your passions and tips for better living from your own experience (just a few ideas to get you started). It’s not for selling your products it’s for sharing who you are as an individual or who your company is as a whole and giving away your know-how so that you build an online trust with those readers.