Guest post from Michael Martine. Michael runs Remarkablogger, where you’ll find tons of free articles, videos, and audio on getting results from your blog: more money and more traffic. Michael is also the author of WordPress SEO Secrets, the most complete step by step guide to WordPress SEO. You can follow Michael on twitter at @remarkablogger.

Getting a domian name, naming your blog, and coming up with a tagline can feel like tough decisions, but they don’t have to be. If you have a good idea of what you’re going to blog about, everything is easier. You have two main considerations: search engine optimization (SEO) and branding/positioning.

Search Engine Optimization

As much as we’d love to think that if you just come up with a clever, catchy blog name, the world will beat a linkpath to your URL, it just ain’t so. People will find you via search. The question is, with what keywords will they find you, and how high in the rankings will your blog be? You want the main subject of your blog to be in the domain name if possible. If you’re a wedding planner in Vermont with a blog, then vermontweddingplanner.com would rock. If you’re a change management consultant, then “changemangement” had better be part of your domain.

Branding/Positioning

Although WordPress SEO is important, it’s not always be possible to get a search-optimized domain name. Or, you may already have a domain, and you’re not about to change it. That’s okay. Branding and positioning are also vitally important. Let’s take the change management consulting example again. Say their company is actually called Move it 4ward. If so, moveit4ward.com would be a great domain from the branding perspective. As long as they had a major page in the blog like moveit4ward.com/changemanagement/, that would work nicely.

Blog Title and Tagline

Your blog’s title doesn’t have to be the same as the domain, but again, including major keywords in it will help, not hurt. The more specific a niche your blog is about, the more narrowly you can title the blog. If our Move it 4ward people did other kinds of management consulting besides change management, then they wouldn’t want to single out any particular type as a primary home page keyword. “Management Consultants” would be an ideal add-on to the company name in the blog title. Why? Because that’s what people who are looking to hire a management consultant are going to search for. If you go for branding in the blog title, then make sure you use primary search keywords in the blog’s tagline. Better yet, if you’re using WordPress, get a plugin or blog theme (such as Thesis) that allows you to have a separation between the blog’s on-page title from the HTML title tags. Both are important in search, but search engines pay more attention to the title tag than people do, and people pay more attention to the headline’s words on the page. I can use my own blog as an example of this. The branded name is Remarkablogger, but the tagline has the keywords “blog consutling” and “coaching” in it. My HTML title tags are also search-optimized separately, thanks to the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin.

Keywords are Important, but they’re not Everything

The main thing you should take away from this post is that while keywords are very important, they’re not everything. Branding and positioning via the blog domain, title, and tagline are also important. Getting both together is the ideal if you can.