Taking 5 minutes to read this article can save you countless hours of effort, and that is being very, very conservative.  You may have heard this before, but it really does bear repeating:  picking the right domain name is very important to your overall SEO efforts and is basically half the battle won, or lost.

I know this from my own trials and errors, so this article was written to show you proof of how costly this mistake is.Please follow along to learn how you can reap the rewards of ordering the proper domain name for your soon-to-be top-ranked site.

My marketing coach told me to set up a home business reviews website by getting a catchy-sounding domain name that had the word “reviews” in it.

So I did what my mentor at the time suggested and ordered that type of domain name and that is what cost me so much time.  You see, when choosing a domain name, you really don’t want a domain name that is catchy or has potential for branding because they generally aren’t good for SEO purposes.

Once I realized this after reading some information about search engine optimization I decided to see if this was really true or not, so I set up a similar site that was also a review site, but was much better because it had all the keywords in it that I was “going after”. Before we proceed, let me say that you should do some keyword research before you ever decide to order a domain name, and doing just that saved me a lot of time and effort.

After gathering together my keywords list, I ordered a domain name that had some of my main keywords in the name itself.

These are the results and rewards of working smarter, and not harder? Home business reviews site #1, which was 3 years old, and had thousands of backlinks was outranking home business reviews site #2 by 3 spots on page 1 of Google, and site #2 is only 3 months old.

The front page of Google listing achieved with site #2 took me only 3 months because I spent 25 minutes doing keyword research and decided on a good domain name for SEO purposes.

Daniel Mcgonagle teaches successful internet marketing practices at his internet marketing blog and he hopes you learned something useful and valuable from this article