how tto pick a good domain name

Hi there guys!
I have to buy a domain for a law office. Can you give me a few hints for that so SEO later is a little bit easier?
Thanks in advance!
Cheers

Suggest knowing your keywords before you start to think about registering a domain. EMD is not required but something which relates to what you are trying to rank for is always good.

Just like Bluefrog about says - do a keyword research and find a highghly popular keyword with low or medium competition. A few months ago I would have suggested you to go for an EMD, but now, after all those Pandas and Penguins, I'm not sure. As far as I know, Google started to penalize EMDs - it feels that most of them are created to 'spam' the engine. So you should choose a domain that includes your best keywords, but does not match it exactly.

Just my $0.02...

The EMD issues on the updates are in fact really about sites which are there with no quality content and which offers no value to the readers, if it was to be setup as, say a blog, which delivered quality, original content in a non-spammy way then an EMD is fine and won't be penalised, however its not a requirement.

If you search for EMD update on here you'll see what has happened and the hypothesised reasons why.

Thanks guys for the help!

My 2 cents

Go for Top Level Domain, register domain with trusted company( NameCom, Go Daddy )

Select the domain name with exactly or closely related to your company name. By brain storming you can get a good idea of your Domain name. You can go to Go daddy or host gator. then you can enter your company name. They will suggest you about some domain names. That's a good way too.
thanks

make your domain name as short as you possibly can. if you can name your domain lawyer.com or whatever (you get the picture), that will be fantastic for you.

hth

Preacher raises a good point, remember that overall you will be dealing with people not search engines and the shorter the better, people tend to forget, get things in the wrong order, spell incorrectly, or generally just get it wrong lol

Just a point of clarification, Google is not penalising EMDs!

They have simply dialed down the additional benefit that an EMD had previously in the serps over a non EMD.
Many sites were previously ranking very highly purely off the back of this extra value that EMDs used to offer. When this additional
ranking boost was removed, sites that had done little to no other optimisation fell to the level that reflected a more realistic ranking
for that site. This started the mass public panic and rumors of EMD penalties.
Think about it why would Google penalise you for matching a commonly searched ketword or keyphrase? Provided your site is about
the subject in your domain, and is optimised well you will not be penalised for it.

EMDs are still valuable for several reasons, first they are still related to the topic or niche so have some residual SEO benefit.
Secondly dont forget the human factor. If a human is looking for a sparkly pink collar for their pet dog, they search for "pink sparkly dog collars"
and they see a list of urls in google:

www.petstuff.com

www.amazon.com>pets>accessories

www.pink-sparkly-dog-collars.com

www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=leather+dog+collar

As a human they are going to still be drawn first to the url that matches exactly what they have searched for...

Well, generally the more condensed the better, so keeping it short and simple is your first guideline. Does the office specialise in a certain kind of law? Where is it? What's your competition? There's some debate about the importance of EMD but on balance I think if you can get an exact match it's worth trying. So if your firm specialises in, say, personal injury and you're in Texas then pilawyerstx, or txinjurylawyers might work.

i THINK you could go look at some brandable domains sold at places . They sell .com domains .. Yu could try a .net and rank the sit with it . Not much difference now i suppose ..

Brand Name Domains not Generic Names
with from 26 to 67 characters long
avoid hyphenated names and Bad Word Combinations in Domain Names

davidjoy said:

Hi there guys!
I have to buy a domain for a law office. Can you give me a few hints for that so SEO later is a little bit easier?
Thanks in advance!
Cheers

Click to expand...

For such strategy, you can purchase the domain with EMD ( exact match domain ) that is related to your niche or service. this holds various SEO benefits.

Don't over-think it, all the time spent trying to get a perfect domain could be outdone by actual work.

Here I have suggestions for you.If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, no need to need to worry about this one.if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there . Good luck to you.