When you get a new domain, it will be to your advantage to think about search engine optimization at the beginning.

Whether it is to make your domain more valuable for a buyer (to whom you can point to good traffic or Pagerank), or for the sake of your income (for which you also need steady, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), search engine optimization is needed unless you are simply going to promote by Pay Per Click.

You may have heard some SEO myths presented as fact. It is now established among the top SEO commentators that key words in the domain itself do not have any effect on the results rankings of site pages. The days are long gone where search engine algorithms could be gamed by simple tricks like creating a domain called buy-my-cheap-discount-widgets.com. Any internal page names, if they include keywords, may have some effect, though this too is not proven.

So, when selecting your new domain name, you shouldn't be concerned when you find all the best domains are already taken. The results will show the domain name to those searching, but that is the only possible benefit of keywords in a domain name.

The second myth is that using pay-per-click on your new domain will get it picked up, get it spidered, and give it a boost in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be completely untrue, and is the result of wishful thinking.

Acquire incoming links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive naturally.

Have worthwhile and original content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't think of original content, look for a writer who can. The old ways of collecting web content – scraping that of others, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat techniques either don't work or will get you degraded in the results.

Don't worry about keyword density, just focus your pages on a natural, coherent subject. In fact, do not worry about the search engines at all. Your aim should be to give something worthwhile to your real audience – your actual visitors.

Trying to validate your new site to W3C standard is a total waste of your time. Google would have to exclude 99% of the internet from its results if it used this as a ranking technique. Use the time saved to create new pages.

Don't pay money to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling PR-based links. This may have worked once, but the search engine algorithms no longer give much weight to tricks like this. Think about it – a cash-rich company could buy its way to the top of the listings for every phrase it wanted, if buying links actually worked: and it would just kill the value of the search engines to their users. This is precisely Google and the other engines want to prevent at all costs.

However, the search engine giants can make mistakes. Some domains, however great and original their content and however numerous their incoming links, just never do anything in the search results. Buy another domain and start over.

To read all about domains, how to buy them and how to make money from them, go here - registering domain names.