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Things to think about before registering a new domain name

Today, I asked a colleague of my to register me a new domain for a website project I was thinking about lately.

The project itself will remain a little mystery for now.
Those who regularly read this blog, could have a little idea and those who’re following me on twitter and actually read my tweets will know something more. If you want to be one of the first to know about it, then follow me on twitter for the latest info.

The hardest thing about most web projects, is finding a proper domain name that’s still available.
The last few days I searched the web for some good domain suggestion sites, to get some idea’s, but at the end I took a domain name that I thought about myself.

What I did to choose my new domain name, I’ve opened notepad and wrote down some keywords that I’ll definitely going to use once the site is up and running.
Because the site has a particular target audience I wanted to make sure that my nr one keyword was in it. So I began puzzling with this keyword and a few others to make some words or a short sentence.
Once this list was completed I started checking if the domain name was available.

After checking two complete lists I numbered it down to 5 available domain names.
It’s unbelievable what domain names people already have registered. And before you think to yourself, now I’ve thought about a domain name nobody else thought about, believe me this is wishful thinking

So now you’ll have a list with only 5 available .com domain names, what’s up next?

Because I just want one domain name, I started thinking which one will be the one that could bring in the most traffic without applying SEO? This is easy, the one that people type in directly when they want to surf to a particular site.
I also searched trough Google’s adwords site to see how much competition I have on some particular keywords and how much searches there are on these keywords. After comparing all of this I made my decision to register a brand new .com domain name. And I must say I’m really happy with it.

Now it’s up to me to make sure the site will go live, make sure that there’s enough content to start with and off course make sure I got my SEO covered.
The SEO part in particular won’t be a problem if you know that the blog you’re reading right now has a SEO score of 98%.

Every now and then I’ll post some more info about the project on this blog, but for those who can’t wait, follow me on twitter to find out first handed.

These are a few quick tips I can give you about finding a good domain name.
So what do you do for finding a good domain name, have some other tips we can use in the future?

Euro 2008 started, will Portugal win the trophy?

A few minutes back the first game of Euro 2008 ended. Too bad for the one of the hosts Switzerland that they’ve lost to Czech Republic with 0-1 but in my opinion, the Czech deserved the win.

They had more ball possession, some of the best chances, and a bit of luck the Swiss didn’t had.

For me the next few weeks will consist out of sleep, work, run a bit and watch as much soccer as I can. So I’m going to excuse myself for not going to update the site as much as before.
Whenever I have some time free I’ll make sure to write something interesting for you all.
And if I run into something interesting, I’m going to make sure I’ll make some free time.

Now a question to you guys and girls.
Are there any soccer fans between my readers?
Who do you think will win the European Championship title?

I think Portugal with a brilliant Christiano Ronaldo and Ricardo Quaresma will have a great chance of winning the title. For Ronaldo it will be the crown on a fabulous season where he has won everything he could win.

Also the Netherlands with a very strong team will be one of the big contenders for the title, but I think they’ll come a bit too short at the deciding moments.

The biggest surprise of the tournament will be Romania in my eyes. They have a team that will work for each other like no other team, making it hard to beat. And if you can’t beat them, they’ll score against you and take away the win. If they survive the group of dead (Italy, France and The Netherlands), anything can happen for them.

Biggest disappointments of this tournament will be:

France: Without Zidane, France isn’t the same anymore and I don’t feel that Ribery is filling the gap Zidane left behind.

Spain: They’re always very strong in the qualifying rounds, but on every tournament, they tend to play bad. Almost like they can’t handle the pressure. I surely hope this year it will be different for them as they do deserve a price for once.

Italy: The World Champions will be lucky if they survive the group stage I feel. With the loss of Cannavaro they lose the hearth of their defense and if you look at the scoring capabilities of the other teams in the group, they have to make sure they’ll score some goals.

So far my opinion, now I’m going to watch the future European Champion (Portugal) play against Turkey. My prediction for this game: 3-1 for Portugal, two goals from Christiano Ronaldo and one from Deco.

What’s your SEO Score?

Today I saw a light bulb popping up above my head for a new site. So I immediately started searching for a proper free domain name. While I was searching I saw something interesting which I’ve always seemed to overlook.
A percentage is displayed for your site’s SEO Score.

What’s SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” ("organic" or “algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.  (source: Wikipedia)

This made me wonder what my Million Dollar Challenge site’s SEO score is.
So I quickly typed in the URL and was pleasantly surprised by an almost perfect score. My SEO score shows an astonishing 98%.

I know that I did a lot of tweaks to make sure I got my site’s SEO worked out like the way it’s supposed, so I’m really happy with this score.
The cool thing about this check is that you also get some info about what you can fix to get a better score.
Like missing Alt tags, I have 7 of them out of 17. Definitely going to fix this.
Look at the screenshot below to see the rest.

And especially if you compare it to other blogs, my site has a really nice score if I say so myself.
A few top money making blogs ranked by SEO Score:

ProBlogger, SEO Score 93%

John Chow, SEO Score 89%

Zac Johnson, SEO Score 88%

ShoeMoney, SEO Score 78%

45N5, SEO Score 78%

Off course this doesn’t mean that I’m making more money than the ones I’ve listed out, but I thought it’s pretty neat that I’m ranking higher than them on this part.
The only thing this is accomplishing is that search engines index your site like the way you would like to be indexed. And as a result you’ll be ranking higher on the particular keywords you’re using.

So what’s your SEO Score? I love to see them in the comments.

Need any help with your SEO? Contact me via the contact form.

Stats for the soccer fans

Well If you’re a big soccer fan like me, you’re surely going to love the site I found browsing the web.

This Saturday, the European Soccer Championship will start in Austria and Switzerland.
And the cool guys from Castrol Performance Index made a little site where you can follow every game live.

Now I’ll hear you thinking, there are lots of other sites where you can follow it or even better you could watch it live on TV. But wait, they show something pretty nice instead.
If you followed some Champions League matches this year, you’ll probably noticed that whenever there’s a player being replaced, they show some info about how many meters this particular player had run during his time on the pitch.

Well this is what they’re showing on this site, not for one player, but for all the players of the game. And also the maximum speed a player had during his game.

True, this isn’t as exciting as the game itself, but it gives you some nice info about what the player has done on the pitch, was he lazy or did he ran after every ball?

But not running much doesn’t mean your lazy, it also can mean that the player just knows where the ball is going to end up, so he doesn’t have to run much.

At the moment they’re displaying some statistics from a few friendly games that were played last week.

Here you can see that Sweden’s Kim Källström ran 12566 meters, the most of all the players and friendly matches right now.
And Philippe Senderos was the fastest one of the bunch, he did a sprint with a maximum speed of 35.9km/h. If he could keep this speed over a 100m distance, he would run it in 10.03 seconds.
A bit far from the new 100m record from Usain Bolt last Saturday, but very fast for a soccer player.

I’m definitely going to take a look at this site next Saturday.

Lightning Bolt breaks 100m World Record

Yesterday Evening, Jamaican Usain Bolt beat Tyson Gay on the 100m at the Reebok Grand Prix Athletics meeting.

Being only 21 years old, he broke the previous record by 0.02 hundreds of a second, to set the new fastest time to 9.72 seconds.
He was a bit lucky with the tailwind (1.7m/sec) being just under the maximum allowed wind (2.0 meters/sec), but you still have to be very very fast.

The previous record holder was his compatriot Asafa Powell.

I can’t wait to see him, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay competing against each other at the Olympics in China in about 2 months. Probably they won’t break the record again there, because of the hot weather, but it will give Usain Bolt some satisfaction if he wins.

He said himself, this record doesn’t mean a thing if I don’t win at the Olympics. The record can be broken every day, the Gold at the Olympics, only every 4 years.