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Every website needs a domain name. Example “WebBootCamp.com” is a domain name. Your domain is your website address, a.k.a. URL (universal resource locator). Should you use your company name for your domain? Maybe, maybe not. Is it memorable? Easy to spell? Does it contain keywords that relate to your business? For more considerations on choosing a domain, I’ve put together the following checklist.

Pick a memorable name. How catchy is it? Would the average person be able to remember just your website name, without looking through their bookmarks (if they have even bothered to bookmark it, that is)?

Make it easy to spell! Face it, most people can’t spell. Try to target for the masses when you pick your name. Think of everyone having a 7th grade education.

Make it short, try for a two or three word domain. When possible, name your company the same as your domain name. Whether you actually add .com to your company’s name makes little difference.

Use keywords in your domain. Try services like:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

https://adwords.google.com/select/tools.html
www.wordtracker.com

To see what people are searching for, in BIG NUMBERS, related to your subject.

Don’t use numbers or hyphens. These are easily overlooked or forgotten when people type in your domain. Unless you’re using a stand out combination like 911alert or 123homerepair, don’t go numeric. If you use hyphens, then every time you tell someone your domain, you have to say “it’s blah-blah-blah.com - with the hyphens”. This is not impressive, and you risk losing traffic to blahblahblah.com. You’re asking your potential customers to work harder, to remember tedious details about your name. Simplicity is important, because you want them to find you. You’re building a brand here.

Don’t buy any other extension except a “.com” This is the best branded domain extension, highly known and trusted. Any other extension is practically worthless, in my book. In addition to being first in the minds of the public, remember also that most people trying to find a company will put a com after that company’s name in their browser. It’s second nature to most of us. A .org can bring attention for non profits, but even most of those companies will try to purchase a .com as well.

Avoid running names together that end in a vowel and begin in a vowel. EXAMPLE: freeebook.com Also try to avoid having the second word start with the same letter as the last letter of the last word. These combinations can look weird, and are often likely to be misread or simply forgotten. By avoiding these two combinations, along with numbers and hyphens, we make sure our words (and our brand) will stand out.

EXAMPLE: WebmasterNow.com

Good For Starting Sentences, Not Domains

Avoid starting your name with THE, or A, if being used as the word A. EXAMPLE asimplehome.com - “a” is likely to be forgotten. While it is true that directory listings usually list alphabetically, search engines do not.

If you can come up with a catchy name starting with “a”, by all means, do so. You may find yourself first in the yellow page listings. Have a look there first, and see what the competition looks like. What are their names, how do they rank?

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. You’ll see that names starting with numbers get displayed first (for non paid listings). So the big question becomes, is yours the type of product or service that will do well from yellow page traffic? You must carefully weigh this against overall branding of your company.

You could of course, have more than one domain, and more than one brand for your company, but be careful about promoting the same sites with different names to the same search engines. You could find yourself banned from those search engines altogether.

Brand New?

Don’t pick your name as your domain name, unless you’re famous. Names aren’t keywords (won’t help your search engine rankings), and usually easily forgotten. Unless you’ve built a big brand around your name already, stick to a good key phrase! It is much easier to brand.

Who’s who, and is my name taken?

To search available domains, and to find out who owns registered ones, use the whois function at http://www.internic.net. If you come across a registered domain, it will show you where it was registered. The next step to detecting the identity of the actual owner, is to visit the registrar (this is where the domain was registered) site listed, and use their whois search. This should provide you with name, address, phone number and email of the rightful owner. Unfortunately, this information is not always available, but it is most of the time.

A Common Myth Equals Missed Opportunities

All the great domains are taken. Hogwash! The dirty little secret is, thousands of great domains expire every day! Here’s a handy resource for finding great expired and expiring domains:

http://www.deleteddomains.com - I’ve found some real gems here, like: 
www.webbootcamp.com, www.webmastertoolset.com,
wwwcustomoilpainting.com and www.customoilpaintings.com - all formerly owned and let go, just to name a few.

When applicable, do try to get the singular and plural versions of your domain like we just saw with
www.customoilpainting(s). When one could be easily be mistaken for the other, it helps to be covered this way. You’re also protecting your brand.

Another expiring domain service to check out is snapcheck.com. They have some interesting statistics for expiring domains, such as google page rank and yahoo and dmoz listed domains. Bear in mind that any “perceived value” on a domain put there by a search engine listing or page rank is inherently fleeting. That’s because the content that was responsible for that listing is now gone, and it is simply a matter of time before the search engine’s spiders crawl the site again, and re-evaluate it’s content. In other words, the search engine ranking is very likely going to disappear soon, unless you quickly repopulate the site with compelling content, worthy of the rank the original site had.

Roads To Nowhere, No Stops Ahead

One tasty bonus that accompanies a popular site is link popularity. This is how many other websites link to the domain in question. Think of a link as a road into your website. Quite often, webmasters do not update their links when the site they’re linking to changes or disappears altogether. So if you find an expired (or soon to be expired) domain with high link popularity (many links to the domain), it may well stay that way for some time to come.

Case in point: special-report-network.net was once a very successful ad network run by online marketing guru Allen Says. For reasons unknown, he shut down the site and let the domain expire. The domain had over 14,000 links pointing to it! The weird part is, it still does! Want proof? Go to alltheweb.com and search for “link:http://www.special-report-network.net”, without the quotation marks. This will show all the sites linking to it. The domain got snatched up by Ultimate Search, a hong kong company that registers thousands of domains, and makes money from paid search results. The site has nothing to do with the original ad network site that Allen built and made successful, yet the links remain, and links equal traffic.

Bear in mind not all links are created equal. Link farms (A.K.A. FFA or “free for all” links pages), and seldom visited by real people. Instead, automated programs add people’s URLs when they submit to a mass submission service, hoping to generate big traffic. Instead, all they get is a bunch of spam, which they’ve agreed to receive, in order for using the service.

How can I snag that expiring hottie?

When you find a name that is pending deletion (the owner hasn’t renewed it), the next step is to try to secure it, the moment it becomes available. Strangely, domains do not fall back into the pool of availability the day they expire. It can take up to 60 days or more in some cases for them to “drop”, and the times are not announced. Thankfully, there are automated services to perform this task for us, such as Namewinner.com, Snapnames.com, Expirefish.com, and Pool.com. Prices vary, and none can guarantee success.

Namewinner lets users bid against each other for expiring domains and only the winner pays, while Snapnames and Expirefish are first come, first served, meaning only one user has a shot at grabbing a particular domain. Snapnames also has the most registrar partners, (including Network Solutions), which may give them an edge for securing expiring domains that are currently registered with their partners. They also have the highest price tag, and you pay whether or not they secure your name. Pool.com is a newcomer that seems to rival the services of Snapnames, with better prices.

One more method you might try, is going directly to the current owner. Let’s say your desired dropping domain is already “back ordered” on Snapnames.com, and Expirefish.com. Now you can still bid for it at Namewinner.com, and Pool.com, but you feel the odds are against you. If you’re really hot on the name, and willing to pay a premium, you may be able to bypass the solutions above, simply by cutting a deal with the current owner.

This can be a bit risky however, because once the owner realizes your interest, they may decide to ask for a unreasonable sum of money, or simply see value in the domain again (generated from your interest), and renew it as an investment. Assuming you can make a deal, you may want to suggest using escrow.com, which eliminates the possibility of fraud for both of you. The owner will need to renew the domain before they can transfer it to you.

The Website Graveyard - Visit Those Spooky Remains!

Once you’ve found a deleted or soon to be deleted domain you fancy, you might want to take a trip into the past, to see what that site used to be! Now bear in mind most domains that are registered are never developed, so there may be nothing at all to see. But for those domains with a tangible history, we can often peek at their ghost, courtesy of the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org.

One Owner, Driven Only On Sundays

Another way to check the history of a domain, is simply to search for it. Try searching google, and groups.google.com, to see what people may have said about the site. You may think twice about purchasing a domain with a sketchy history.

Speculators Beware!

Don’t go overboard and buy every known extension for your brand - (.net, .org, .biz, .info, etc.). Big corporations like google can afford to buy all the country domains. When you’re starting out, remember, domain fees are yearly, and you need to consider the lifelong cost of each domain. For most people, one domain is just fine.

You may think snatching up good domains and reselling them would be a lucrative business. The problem is, finding a buyer is not easy. In fact, that’s an understatement.

Don’t register domains containing trademarks. You will likely here from that company’s legal department if you do, and will be forced to relinquish the name by The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), or a lawsuit, or both.

Who’s in charge?

Icann (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) oversees the domain registration business. Their URL is http://www.icann.org. If you ever have trouble with your registrar, it may be worth reporting to Icann.

Case in point: A client of mine tried to switch his domain to another registrar (at my suggestion), to get added free features (free URL forwarding), and save money. His current registrar denied the transfer, and tried to charge him a fee for leaving! Once we threatened to take up the matter with Icann, and publicly expose them at Icann’s forum (http://forum.icann.org/regxfer), they immediately backed down, and released the domain.

If you believe someone has registered a domain that infringes on your trademark (or has infringed on your intellectual property), the authority to see is The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), at http://wipo.org

Brand Awareness

Capitalize each word of your domain in your sig files and letterhead, and anywhere else you advertise your domain. It helps your brand stand out.

EXAMPLE:

http://www.WebBootCamp.com looks better than http://www.webbootcamp.com

Also, only add in http://www. when you’re creating links back to your site (i.e., email, websites, and online forms). In all your offline advertising, such as signs, business cards and letterhead, you should definitely skip http://www. and just use “YourDomain.com”. You only have a second or two of people’s attention when they see your URL, so make it count. Brand that name! Just make sure your web host has your site set up to show without WWW. Most sites are correctly set up to display when a person types in “YourDomain.com”, or “www.YourDomain.com” but a handful, maybe 10% or so will show page not found, if you skip “www”. That could be devastating, so check with your host, and demand that your site come up either way!

Ready To Buy Your .com?

Don’t overpay! I’m still surprised that many people don’t know they can buy domains for under $10 these days. Shop around. Currently I recommend http://www.TOSDomains.net. They offer a lot of extras like URL and email forwarding, free.

Keep Your Registration Current!

Don’t let your domain expire! You cannot afford to be even a day late in payment. If it falls into the redemption period, you may find yourself high jacked by your registrar for an outrageous renewal fee. See this illuminating article for more about the redemption period - “Domain Redemption Period Farce Exposed!” here: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1034. If your expired domain falls back into the available pool, it may be registered by anyone, and you may have little recourse trying to recover it.

The easiest way to ensure you are sent renewal notices for your domain is to keep your email contact current for your domain. Perhaps the most common reason for people losing their domains, is simply that they switch ISPs, and subsequently, their email address changes, and they forget to update that information with their domain registrar.

If you own a lot of domains, keeping up with administration can be tedious. One trick I rely on, is to use one domain for my primary business email address, and on that registration “admin” contact, I use my ISP email. For all my other domain registrations, I use my primary business email address (based on my primary domain, which I will never let go). Now, if I should switch ISPs, all I need to concern myself with is changing that one domain record, to reflect my new ISP email. All my other domain records have that primary domain email as the admin contact, so as long as I keep the one record current (and keep the email account active), all will be current, and all domain renewal notices will be sent to me.

In the end, it’s not so much about the name, as it is what you make of it. Just look at all the big successful internet companies out there with strange names! Yahoo!

About The Author:

Jim Symonds publishes Web Secrets Exposed! Eye popping, and jaw dropping, sneaky little web design tricks & web marketing secrets revealed. How did they do that? We show you! Subscribe Now FR*E! Just Go To: http://www.WebSecretsExposed.com

What is a domain name? A domain name is the location of your website on the Internet. Your domain name will be what you become known by online so it’s important to get it right.

Each website on the Internet is labeled with something called an IP address which is the actual address of the website online. A typical IP address looks like this: 159.134.27.64. Remembering a string of numbers like that is difficult so a domain name translates all those numbers into something like www.amazon.com. This is far easier to remember.

#1 Dot what?

Each domain has what’s called an extension. The most well known of these extensions is .com. This, however, is not the only type of domain extension available. There is also:

.net

If you can’t find your preferred .com domain name you could always choose the same domain with a .net extension. It might not have the same ring as a .com but is still as just useful as a .com.

.org

These domain extensions were originally designed for educational and more formal websites. Anybody can register a .org however so you have more options for domain selection.

.info

A more recent introduction to the domain name game are .info domains. Many of the valuable .info domains were bought up overnight but there’s still a huge range of good .info domains available. With a little creativity you could really make a .info work for you e.g. www.moviereview.info.

Bear in mind that most web surfers tend to remember .com more easily than anything else.

#2 Branding vs Business Name

There is an age old debate on the whether or not you should establish a brand name online or use a domain that more actually reflects your real business. Let’s look at Amazon as an example. Amazon sells books online. Most people setting up a business would have chosen say www.booksonline.com instead of www.amazon.com. Amazon has since established itself as a brand name of global recognition - proving the value of building a brand name.

You’ll need to choose between the two. Brand name or your own business name. Consider how your domain sounds, how it might look on a business card and how well it relates to your business.

There’s no one right answer to this question. You need to choose what makes most sense for you, your website and your business in general.

#3 Hyphenated or not

This is another area of debate. Should your domain be one single word or should the words be separated by hyphens? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Single word domain names can be easier to explain, use on header paper and lend themselves to brand names very well.

Single word domains are in very, very short supply.

Hyphenated domains names can be slightly more difficult to explain, may not look as well on headed paper and possibly harder to establish as a brand name. There’s no shortage of multiple word domains.

The single biggest advantage a hyphenated domain has is that search engines can “read” the domain more easily. For example in a domain like www.foreignholidaysonline.com the search engine can only read the first word “foreign” and that’s it. It can’t tell anything else about the website domain name.

If you hyphenated that to www.foreign-holidays-online.com the search engine can read “foreign”, “holidays” and “online” as separate words and therefore knows that this website is about foreign holidays.

A well chosen hyphenated domain name can be just as effective as a single word domain name.

#4 Your Domain Registrar

These are the people you pay to register the domain for you. There are dozens if not hundreds of these companies out there so which one do you choose? This takes some research but things worth checking are:

• Do you retain sole ownership of the domain or do the registrar keep some level of control over it?

• Search Google for any horror stories relating to the registrar,
  does the registrar allow you to transfer the domain to another registrar?

• Is there an online control panel for domain administration?

• How easy is it to change the domain Name Servers?

• Shop around for domain registrars

• What you really want to find is a previously
  satisfied customer to ask questions before you buy

#5 Cheap Domain Names

You can save a lot of money on the domain names you purchase. A typical .com domain costs about $15 to register from most registrars. However you can get the same domain for as little as $7.95 from other, very reliable, companies.

Oddly enough some of the cheaper domain registrars are more reliable, have fewer horror stories and offer equally good customer service as their more expensive competitors.

Are there any disadvantages in using a discount domain registrar? Will it affect your website in any way? The answer to both is a definite No.

About The Author:

Niall Roche

http://www.affiliate-advocate.com is run by Niall Roche. The site offers reviews of affiliate marketing ebooks and software as well as advice and tips for new and existing affiliate marketers.

An effective domain name can help to brand your site. It can also communicate to your customers the types of products you sell online. An easy to remember domain that describes your services should be the goal of every site owner. Here are some techniques that you can use to create the best domain name for your company.

Describe your products or services

One way to come up with an effective domain name is to describe your product or services. Write down every word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of your product or service. The easiest way is to keep writing for two to five minutes without stopping. It’s a creative writing technique that can yield a huge cache of keywords that you can plug into any registration application until you find a domain name that fits. This technique is effective, quick and free.

English has a large vocabulary list

The English language has one of the largest vocabulary lists in the world. If you can’t find a way to describe a product or service, take a break, come back in a few minutes and try again. Try to see how many different ways you can say the same thing. You already have access to the vocabulary list and ideally you will know your product or service better than anyone else. Pretend that you’re describing it to a friend and in a few minutes you will have a long list of words that you can use as your domain name.

Most short words are taken

Yes, many of the shorter words such as “men”, “women” and “book” are taken. In today’s marketplace, you can’t rely on such generic terms to bring in traffic. An effective, memorable domain name must go beyond being a novelty to being an asset that helps customers remember your site and your product. Try putting two or three words together. This will make it easier for them to come back to your site and make a purchase.

Brainstorm your way to a great domain name

Brainstorming is the only way to get a good domain name. Whether you write, use a name generation software, a dictionary or try random words, it’s your creative approach that will give you quality results in less time.

Here are 4 easy domain name generation ideas:

• Write about the product(s) that you plan to sell

• Write about the topic or theme of your site

• Write about the type of customers you want to visit your site

• Start with one word descriptions and then add secondary words until your get an effective word or phrase that you register as your domain name.

• Check out your competitor’s websites.

Are they using words that fall into a specific category like product names, rhyming words, or names of cities? These can all give you clues about what types of words and descriptions that make the best domain names for your type of service. It can also give you some clues into what works best with customers and search engines. In this case, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just tweak it a bit to get better results.

You’ll also have words for your Search Engine Marketing Campaign

The cool thing about this technique is that it will also help you to generate a list of words that you can use later on as part of your search engine optimization campaign. Whether you plan to do this on your own or through a Pay-Per-Click service, you will be ahead of the game with a long list of keywords to choose from.

About The Author:

Syd Johnson is the Executive Editor of RapidLingo.com, Financial Solutions Website. You can see more articles at http://www.rapidlingo.com

A professional or business site is one where the primary purpose of the site is to facilitate business transactions. You can sell items directly online or exclusively offline, but the result is the same. You want customers to buy products and/or service directly from you.

To create a domain name for this type of website here are a few guidelines:

• Shorter is better

• Make the name easy to pronounce

• Think long term

• Stick to Categories and Topics

• Do a trademark search

• Always have a tag line

• Shorter is better

If you want to make real money online, try to keep your domain name as short as possible. In the online world, the choices of where to shop and get information is overwhelming. A shorter name will instantly be memorable. It is always easier to remember short words and phrases. A shorter name is good for word of mouth advertising online and offline. Customers can easily remember the the URL and therefore they’re more likely to pass it on and return to the website. The name will also stand out when it is printed on brochures, business cards and other business collateral. Liz, Dick, Kate, Feds are all examples of our incessant need to reduce every term in the English language to three syllables or less.

Easy to Pronounce

If you want a short name, you must be very creative. To be creative and strategic make sure that your domain name is easy to pronounce. It is perfectly acceptable to create a name from scratch, but it must sound like a real word when you try to say out loud. Any three or four syllable term will do a long as it easily rolls off the tongue. If you are at a loss for words, try writing a description of your product or service on paper.

This is a very easy way to come up with those little words that you can use without losing the meaning of what you’re trying to say. You can also use a dictionary and a thesaurus to come up with additional words. You can also choose a longer word but shorten it or use acronyms only. When you decide on a domain name, say it out loud a few times. If it doesn’t sound right, go back to the dictionary and try again.

Think long term

You want a domain name that will last a very long time. If you pick a name that is a slang term or too cutesy, you could find yourself looking for a new name in a year or two. This is not the best way to proceed. Once you build a certain level of online success, the traffic will follow the domain name. You don’t want to mess with your brand and your online reputation with redirects and ‘we have moved’ notices. Online customer will buy, but only if your site makes it convenient for them to do so. If you don’t see yourself using the same domain name three to four years from now, get a new name before you set up your website.

Trademark Searches

Do a trademark search. If you build up your online business and domain name, you don’t want to find a court order ordering you to give it up because it belongs to another company. Remember, the traffic and therefore your sales will follow the domain name to the new company.

To do a quick trademark search go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov) for domestic searches and the International Trademark Association (http://www.inta.org) for international searches. If your name is cleared, then consider getting a trademark to protect your business.

Tag line

Tag lines are the work horses of the marketing industry. An interesting, professional tag line can bring you more word of mouth advertising than you can ever buy from a search engine company. It will bring your name into random conversations in newsgroups, newsletters and casual conversations. This can help you save money on paid advertising and create the ultimate viral marketing campaign without very little effort.

Keep these six tips handy to brand your domain name and bring in more site traffic.

About The Author:

Syd Johnson is the Executive Editor of RapidLingo.com, Financial Solutions Website. You can see more articles at http://www.rapidlingo.com

Ever wonder why DNS systems came into existence? Efficiency. Every computer has a distinct IP address, and the Internet needed an elite method for obtaining these addresses and for managing the system as a whole. Enter ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number manages the DNS root of the Internet domain namespace. ICANNs role is to manage the assignment of identifiers, ensuring that all users have unique names.

The DNS system is run by a series of servers called DNS servers. ICANN manages the root DNS domains, under which are the top-level domains. It also manages:

• Organizational domains

• Geographical domains

• Reverse domains

• Beneath the top-level domains are other naming authorities such as Nominet, the UKs naming authority.

How does a DNS Query work?

The process occurs in two parts. Firstly, a name query begins at a client computer and is passed to DNS client service for resolution. When the query cannot be resolved locally, DNS servers are queried.

For example, when a web browser calls the fully qualified domain name www.discountdomainsuk.com, the request is passed on to the DNS client service to resolve the name by using locally cached information. If the query is held in the cache, then the process is complete.

If, however, the query cannot be answered locally, the DNS client service uses a server list (ordered in sequence) to query external DNS servers. When a DNS server receives a query, it first checks to see if it is authoritive for that domain name. If it is authoritive, it resolves the name, and the process is complete.

If the DNS server is unable to resolve the query, it in turns queries other DNS servers, using a process known as recursion. DNS servers make use of root hints to assist in locating DNS servers, which are able to provide the required result. In this way, DNS queries are minimized and the Internet is able to operate quickly and effectively.

A typical query may run as follows:

• Client contacts Nameserver A looking for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

• Nameserver A checks its cache, but cant answer, so it queries a server authoritive for the Internet root.

• The root server responds with a referral to a server authoritive for the .com domains. NameserverA queries the the .com server and gets referred to the server authoritive for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

• Nameserver A queries this server and gets the IP address for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

• Nameserver A replies to the client with the IP address.

Queries can return answers that are authoritive, positive, negative or referral in nature. In the event of a negative answer, another DNS server is queried.

About The Author:

Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to http://www.discountdomainsuk.com

Registering a domain name is a pretty straight forward process. In fact the hardest part of registering a domain name is coming up with a name that has not already been registered. There are some people who have never registered a domain name, they have left it up to a third party or have always used free hosting. Here is simple explanation of how to register a domain.

The first thing you need to come up with is the name itself, this believe it or not is the hardest part. As there have been so many domain names registered there are not many choices left for keywords to use in your domain name. There are two routes you can go down for choosing your name, using keywords or thinking up your very own word.

Which ever route you choose you are going to need several ideas for a name so jot lots of ideas on a piece of paper first. Write down a list of keywords that you can use in any combination or come up with a list of your own made up words. I chose NameSearchDomain for my site but only because most other combinations of the words that I wanted to use had already been taken. You could of course try making up your own word such as Google, it’s both catchy and memorable.

Once you have a list of possible names you will need to find out if they are available. To do this you will need to visit a domain name registrar. I use Godaddy but I would not recommend them to a first time user as they offer too many extras which could easily catch out a newbie during registration. I would suggest you check out a few forums such as DN forum for recommendations, visit a few sites and see which you feel comfortable with. For dot com names look to pay around ten dollars.

Having found a domain name registrar then you need to go through your list of names to see if they are available. To do this just type the name into the search box and select an extension, it is usually best to use .com because of it’s popularity. If a domain name you have chosen is available for registration then you will be given the option to register it. All you need to do now is follow the on screen instructions and the brand new domain is yours.

Once you have registered a new name you will need to point it towards your web space, this is presuming you are purchasing the name to create your own site. To do this you will have to provide some DNS information, you can get this from your web host. You should have two addresses, probably both starting with NS, probably NS1 and NS2, you need to add this information into your domain name registration account under Domain name servers. You will usually need two, a primary server and a secondary server. This will take a while to propagate through the internet servers, usually anywhere up to 72 hours. Once the DNS information has propagated then you will be able to type in your domain name in a web browser and arrive at your web site.

This is pretty much an overview on what you need for domain name registration. It should provide you with a grounding for being able to register your own domain. An important word of advice before you register your domain, all sales are final, that means once you have purchased a domain name there is no refund. A final tip, the longer you register as domain for the more discount you usually get. I would advise only registering for a minimum of 1 year initially in case you get cold feet later, you don’t want to be stuck with a useless domain name for 10 years.

About The Author:

Allan is the webmaster at NameSearchDomain.com where you can find out all about Domain names.

Domain name registration is a necessary, easy, and strategically important first step in establishing an online presence, whether for business or otherwise. A well-chosen domain name registration can set you up for success with your new site in so many ways, the most prominent of these being increased search engine traffic. Here’s some vital elements to consider when executing your domain name registration.

A good domain name registration, particularly for an online business, (which is the main focus of this article) is easily done, but at the same time requires choices that will impact your site’s effectiveness. So here, in no particular order, are some things to bear in mind when doing a domain name registration.

The extension - Will it be a .com, .net, .org, .info etc. Any of these will get spidered and indexed by the search engines, but if you can get a .com for your chosen name you’d be better off, as this extension is more common and carries an air of legitimacy with it.

Try not to have you domain name registration with your web host. The reason being that should you decide to part ways with your host, (and this isn’t uncommon!) it’s potentially a massive headache to move your domain as well. Split them up: you’ll be glad you did!

Your domain name registration, purchased from a reputable company should run you somewhere between $1-10, depending on the extension and the amount of time you sign up for.

Probably the most important aspect of your domain name registration is the choice of keywords to use in your domain name. Try to use the main keyword or phrase you’d like to optimize the whole site for, and see if you can craft a domain name around it. The search engines seem to favor keyword-rich domain names. Nuff said.

Keep it short if possible. A shorter name is easier to remember than a long one.

Don’t use your company name unless it has your keywords in it. There’s no point in ranking high for your name if no one is looking for it yet.

Try to keep your domain name registration topically relevant. As search engines get smarter and smarter, sites that display total relevance will rank higher than catch all sites.

Lastly, be sure to avoid other companies trademarks and copyrights in your domain name. For example, let’s say you’re an affiliate of The Sharper Image. It’s tempting to use some version of that name to promote your affiliate site, but don’t do it, unless of course you’d like to meet their lawyers!

To sum up, your domain name registration is easy to do, but important to do well. It can make the difference in whether you get found or not!

About The Author:
Keith Thompson is the webmaster at Domain Name Registration Today where you will find the latest news and information on domains.

“What was the name of that website? It was good. It has something to do with…”

Is your web site like many others?

Domain names always on the tip of a visitor’s tongue, but not quite memorable enough?

Your choice of domain name needs to be easy to remember, as well as focused enough that your visitor will know right away what your site is about.

A Few Rules,
some rules do apply when deciding on a domain name:

Domain names must be at least two characters long but no more than 63 characters, not counting the TLD.

You can use any combination of letters, numbers, or hyphens, but you can’t use a hyphen as the first or last character.

Domain names are not case-sensitive, so my-home-based-business-advisor.com is the same as My-Home-Based-Business-Advisor.com.

Choosing A Domain Name,
choosing good domain names is almost as important as choosing your actual business (see our Startup Ideas page).

There are many different schools of thought when it comes to
picking good domain names:

• Some say to choose a short, concise name.

• Some like numbers in the name, some don’t.

Hyphens and underscores — as opposed to words all running together — are another debated topic. It’s mostly a matter of easier reading for your human visitors. Which do you find easier to read?

• myhomebasedbusinessadvisor

• my_home_based_business_advisor

• my-home-based-business-advisor

• Generally, the hyphens between words make domain names easier to read for most people.

While search engines don’t rank domain names, a keyword-rich name will let your visitors know what your web site is about before they get there. This makes them more comfortable because they know what they’re getting in advance.

Also, when you get other sites to link to yours, that link is usually based on your domain name. This means that your main keyphrase (which you used as your domain name) will be the actual anchor text and search engines do give additional ranking for that.

Domain names play a major role in making your dream memorable to the world.

Take the time to do it right and your dream of a home-based business will be seen all over the world!

About The Author:

Terry Nicholls writes from his own experience as someone who wanted to start his own home-based business. Now that he has, visit My Home-Based Business Advisor - Helping YOUR Home Business Start and Succeed for free help for YOUR home business, including ideas, startup, and expansion advice.