Maybe you are thinking , "all the good domain names are taken already" ? Not so ! Sure, more the 72,000,000 domain names have already been registered, but this doesn’t mean it would be impossible to register a good domain name relevant to your business. Your success depends on: 1°) how you select your domain name; and 2°) how you promote your domain name. In this article I shall explain domain name selection.

Domain name selection can be done as follows:

a) Visit the following website: "http://labs.google.com/" and select "Google Suggest". Say for example you need to register a domain name for your handbags selling website-store. Then type "handbags" in the Google Suggest search box, and you see that 8,550,000 results are found. For "handbags retailers" we find 156,000 results. These results give us an idea of the keyword popularity. It is important to use relevant and popular keywords in our new to register domain name.

b) Next visit the following website: " https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal". Enter "handbags retailers", and choose data to display: "Keyword popularity". Then press "Get more keywords", and next press "Additional keywords to consider". Remember we are looking for keywords high on search volume, but low on competition. So press "Advertiser competition". As a result we see two keywords are low on competition and high on search volume: "handbags store" and "handbags retail".

c) Say for example your store name is "McFeeley Leather Goods and Travel Accessories". Then you could decide to register: "www.handbags-store-mcfeeley.com" or "www.handbags-retail-mcfeeley.com". These domain names are relevant for our example business, high on search volume, and low on competition. In order to get interested visitors to our website, we shall start to promote it via quality links. The more external links a website has, the more visitors it shall get, the higher the rankings in the search engines. Interested visitors, means customers ! I shall explain this in the article "Domain Name Promotion Tips".

F. Heymans invites you to visit Domain–Hosting.Hegatrading.Com where you can register your very own domain name. When you visit domain–hosting.hegatrading.com, you will be able to select a domain name, that suits your goal. To get your own domain name today, register at: Domain–Hosting.Hegatrading.Com/index.php

They always say that when choosing a domain name use keywords in it but I had to figure it out on my own because no one actually will tell you how to do it. After reading the tip about using keywords I came up with the domain tipsonhowtosavemoney.com vet the truth be told I had created a new keyword because unless somebody actually entered tipsonhowtosavemoney as one word in the search box they would not pull up my domain. I at first thought that the search engines would be able to see the words tips, save and money in my url but that isn’t the case. You have to separate the keywords with hyphens.

When my wife and I started web hosting we registered the domains coastal-georgia-hosting ,com and .net. This way anybody who searches on the words coastal or Georgia or hosting will have a good chance of pulling up our domain. In order to get higher rankings the search engines like to see the domain and the title of your site to be the same so the title on our hosting site is Coastal Georgia Hosting. People, companies, who register their company name as a domain are basically reinventing the wheel for instance Bob’s Sloppy Joes as bobssloppyjoes.com. They just invented a new keyword.

I figured that people doing a search for hosting providers have a good chance of pulling up our site. The same goes for anybody search on the word Georgia or coastal. When they do a search for both Georgia and hosting at the same time the chances that our site will show up in the results are even greater.

Some experts say not to chose too long of a domain name but I don’t buy this. If you choose a domain name that has 15 keywords in it then you have increased your chances that your domain will show up in the results of somebody doing a search on one or two of those keywords. Now if you also use your domain name in the title of your site then your chance are even great that your site will come up more often.

Jeffrey Solochek is the Purple Cow of todays writers always adding his own unique wit and humor to everything. http://www.nosugarcoating.info

The Internet domain name system (DNS) helps users to refer to websites using easy-to-remember domain names rather than numeric IP addresses. The rightmost domain name, also called the top-level domain (TLD), is categorized into three types. The first type is the two-lettered domain name referred to as country code TLD, normally delegated to individuals or organizations in that particular country. The second type is a special TLD called “arpa” that is used for technical infrastructure purposes. The third is the generic TLD, or generic domain name.

Generic domain names are three or more letter extensions that can further be subdivided into sponsored or un-sponsored TLDs. In the beginning, generic domain names were available in .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org extensions, out of which .com, .net, and .org were used for registration without restriction. In recent years, more generic TLDs were introduced for specific communities. These include .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum. The first four are free domain names, and the last three are sponsored domain names. Free TLD operates under policies established by the global Internet community directly through the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), while sponsored TLD is administered by a sponsor representing a specific community that is concerned with that TLD. The sponsor is responsible for policy formulation or any matters related to that particular TLD.

There are about sixteen generic domain names available for use. They include .aero, .biz, .cat, .com, coop, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .jobs, .mil, .mobi, .museum, .name, .net, .org, .pro, and .travel.

Internet Domain Names provides detailed information on Internet Domain Names, Free Internet Domain Names, Generic Internet Domain Names, Internet Domain Names Canada and more. Internet Domain Names is affiliated with Domain Registration And Hosting.

Often overlooked but indeed strategically very important, is keyword research before you register a domain name. When done properly this gives you the advantage of being on page one of search engines like Google.com, for your strategic keywords.

Let’s say you have already created your website off-line, but you are still looking for a suitable url. Please take a look at the content of your index page (main page) of your website and determine what the most important keyword phrases are, that are to be found on your index page. These key-phrases need to be at least two words long, but better is to have them three to five words long, since this is the average number of words used in search phrases. Be sure to use your strategic keywords in your domain name.

Once you have these phrases, optimize your main page for these strategic keyword phrases by adjusting the tags in the head section of your main website page html code. Adjust the title tag, meta keyword tag and meta description tag. If necessary adjust also the body text using html heading tags h1 to h6. Repeat this action for every single page of the website you created. A tool which can help you in this effort is WebCEO (there is a link on my web-page; see also at the end of this article).

Investing time in doing this optimization effort for your website, in order to determine a relevant domain name and creating optimized web pages, will pay off in high ranking at search engines, some where on the first page. Bringing interested visitors to your website, ready to read several pages, ready to buy your products.

F. Heymans invites you to visit Domain–Hosting.Hegatrading.Com where you can register your very own domain name. When you visit domain–hosting.hegatrading.com, you will be able to select a domain name, that suits your goal. To get your own domain name today, register at: Domain–Hosting.Hegatrading.Com/index.php

If you don’t have a well known brand-name or the resources to build a brand that people might search for, why register a domain name that gives you no advantage whatsoever in the search engines, where people search for your product or service? The worst offenders are small consultants who operate under the three-letter acronym names that mean nothing to most people. There is enormous value to picking a company name and domain name that contain targeted keywords for the benefit the search engines.

Unless you want somebody to steal your traffic, think about domain names that are already plural or that can’t be pluralized by the simple addition of an "s." If you register frame-master.com, just wait a week. Someone will probably register frame-masters.com in hope of stealing some of your customers. One benefit of registering the plural form of a word is that you’ll likely gain the ranking for the singular and plural forms.

The informational page serves as a navigational assist to the searcher who might not have located the site’s content because they were not searching with the same language used in the website. Be sure, therefore, to register additional keyword-rich domain names for informational pages. Informational pages really become small navigational websites. They discuss a particular topic in some detail; perhaps they summarize some content area of the website and then link users to that area of the website. There is absolutely no reason why this informational content can’t be placed on an external domain name.

Pamela Upshur is active as a freelance writer and is heavily involved in internet marketing. You may view her latest website at:

Turnkey Home Based Business

Once you have decided what you want your website to focus on, the next important step to take is that of selecting an appropriate domain name. If you are unsure as to what a domain name is all about, it can be likened to your residential or business address or perhaps your telephone number. Its purpose is to allow visitors to locate you on the Internet. So it is important that the domain name you decide to use is appropriate and depicts what your website is all about.

Before you can start using a domain name you need to check with a domain registry service to find out if the name you want is available. For domain names ending in .com the availability of distinctive and unique sounding names is practically non existent.

You will need to be willing to play with the words you want in your domain name to see if this helps you find one available that meets your specifications. You may need to change your wording to get a registered domain name. You will also need to think about this carefully as this name is going to depict your website and the services and products you are offering your visitors. An inappropriate domain name might result in less traffic to your site. Less traffic means missed opportunities to grow you online presence.

Trade marking your name is a wise decision but this is a more involved topic which should be dealt with by a qualified practitioner in this area of legal expertise.

Your domain name will form part of your web address. For example mybusiness@domain.com. Once visitors click on your web address they are immediately transferred to your web site. Naturally it is extremely important that the spelling of your domain name is accurate otherwise your visitors may end up on someone else’s landing page.

To have your website operational it is not vital that you have your own domain name, however if your web hosting company goes out of business you lose your address and have to be transferred over to an alternative hosting company. This may prove a costly exercise if you then have to change your offline stationary to reflect the changes to your web address.

The length of a domain name is restricted to 26 characters. It is best to keep your domain name as short as possible as it makes it easier for your visitors to remember your domain name and keep on returning to your site. Lengthy domain names are less easier to remember. Please remember that domain names are not case sensitive and you can use a mix of upper and lower case alpha characters and numbers to make it easier to read.

Once your domain name is found to be available you will then need to register it with one of the domain registers online. Usually membership is for a two year period but 12 months registration is also available if you prefer this option. If you do not act immediately when you decide on what you want your domain name to be, it is fairly likely that the next time you check you may find that someone else has taken it.

With your domain name in place and your website concept decided upon, you are now ready to proceed to the next vital stage of actually deciding on the design of your website.

If you would like to read more of what Mel has to offer about Building a website in next2notime please go to www.next2notime.wordpress.com

The World of Domains

One of the first things you need to consider when deciding to build a webpage is a domain name. The internet is made up of millions of domain names. What is a domain name? A domain name is your address on the internet. Your dot com, dot net, or dot org. It’s what comes after the www. For example my domain name is oceanbox.net. People type www.oceanbox.net to get here. Your domain name can be whatever you want as long as it is not being used by anyone else you, which brings us to our next point.

Registration

You choose your domain name by going to www.godaddy.com. There are a few repudible companies out there who will set you up with a domain but GoDaddy is the best and cheapest way to go. Whatever you do, do not use Network Solutions. They’ve been around for the longest but their business ethics suck. GoDaddy is the largest internet registrar, being responsible for over 1/3rd of the US’s new domain name registrations. Visit www.godaddy.com to register a new domain name

Choosing a Domain Name

When choosing a domain name, keep it short and mermorable. Long domain names are harder to remember, and harder to get people to come back to. Short & easy to remember websites such as google.com, amazon.com, and ebay.com keep people coming back because they are easy to remember. Also try to stay away from dashes. (e.g. something-something.com) unless it is neccessary. People often forget about the dashes, and end up somewhere other than your website.

Conclusion

Well that’s all there is to it. Register your domain today and get start building your website.

This article was written by Erin Chew of www.oceanbox.net

I Can’t Remember Where I Purchased My Domain Name!

It wasn’t until my third client had called asking how to regain control of her domain name that I realized that it was a common problem for small business webmasters to forget where they had registered their domains. WHOIS my registrar? Why didn’t I get an email about renewal? Why did my site stop working today?

People rarely realize how important it is to keep their domain registrar notified of changes to their email address and and other contact information. The registrar will send renewal notifications to the email address last on file. For most domain owners, the only time they think about contacting a registrar is the day they reserve their domain name. If they move to a new city and get a new internet service provider, it doesn’t occur to them that the old email address will change and that meeans that the registrar can no longer contact them through the previous address, or phone or fax as each of them change and we rarely notify the controller of our domain of those changes.

Sometimes the first indication a business owner will have that there is a problem is the day their web site stops working. If they failed to notify their domain registrar of changed email address, they may never have received their domain renewal notice. Since many registrars honor a 30 day "redemption period" allowing expired domains to be redeemed, it may be possible to save the registration within 30 days following expiration by contacting registrars during 30 day domain redemption periods.

The following URL leads to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (AKA ICANN) discussing the grace period and redemption period rules it enforces.

http://www.icann.org/bucharest/redemption-topic.htm

So how does a domain owner find out who their registrar is if they’ve forgotten? Simple WHOIS inquiries will tell you everything the registrar knows about your domain. Public WHOIS records show the owner’s contact email, street address, phone and fax numbers. But that’s not all, it also shows the current registrar, DNS servers, the creation and expiration dates of the domain name. Here is how to check your WHOIS data. Type the following into your browser address bar:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=google.com

Replace google.com with your domain name and click go. If you don’t, you’ll see the following contact information:

Administrative Contact:

DNS Admin (NIC-14290820) Google Inc.

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View CA 94043

US

*********@google.com

+1.6506234000

Fax- +1.6506188571

You’ll also see the domain servers, which usually includes the host name like so:

Domain servers in listed order:

NS3.GOOGLE.COM

NS4.GOOGLE.COM

NS1.GOOGLE.COM

NS2.GOOGLE.COM

This normally shows only two servers (Google is bigger than you.)

So now that you are armed with WHOIS data, you can see:

1. Who the registrar is. (Hence WHOIS)
2. Who the Domain Administrative, technical contacts are.
3. Owner names, addresses, emails, phone and fax numbers.
4. Domain creation, expiration and "last updated" dates.
5. Domain servers and backup servers.

What do you do if your domain name shows expired and it has stopped working? Do that WHOIS search and contact the listed registrar at their customer support number. They’ll ask you to prove who you are by verifying some registration details. If you can’t remember access passwords to log in to domain management consoles, they’ll often accept faxed copies of your photo ID or a some standard identification proof and reset your username and password to give you access again.

Forgetting to notify your registrar is not the only way to lose control of your domain. There are hundreds of stories of unethical hosting companies, webmasters and even spouses (since divorced) holding domain names in the name of a small business because the domain owner was not web savvy and didn’t understand how important that domain name signup day was. Keep your registrar name, your log in username, password and domain management URL permanently recorded somewhere with your most important business papers. Don’t allow anyone to register your domain name for you if they don’t put YOUR name, email address and phone numbers in "Administrative Contact" position during registration.

Some business owners confuse their web host with their internet service provider and further confuse both with the domain registrar. Since many ISP’s offer web space, or hosting, and also provide domain registration through their initial signup package, it’s not easy to separate the three distinctly different entities. You needn’t host with your internet service provider and they’re (almost) never your domain registrar. Keep them separate and completely apart in your mind.

1. Internet service provider. (AT&T, Verizon, SBC Global.)
2. Web hosting provider. (Pair Networks, Verio web hosts.)
3. Domain Registrar. (GoDaddy, Register.com Yahoo Domains.)

When a client recently moved her hosting, she asked me how to make that happen and had no idea how important the details were. We first established a new hosting account, then determined new domain name servers, uploaded her web files. we made sure that account was live with the new web host, then contacted the domain REGISTRAR to change to the new domain servers in a domain management console.

This same client had nearly told her old web host to close her account before we found out that the registrar had her old, previous email address as "Administrative contact" email for her domain name. It took two days to straighten that out and make corrections. Her site would have been down for two days if she had shut down her old hosting account as she had planned before speaking with me. She had a new hosting account set up, but failed to realize the importance of the registrar change to DNS server records in the moving scenario.

We then notified the previous host of the change, only AFTER the domain was resolving to the new host so that when the site was turned off at the old host, it was already working at the new host.

Don’t be caught by surprise! You can protect your domain name by registering it for the maximum time of ten years and extend it every year to that final, tenth year, rather than waiting for it to near expiration. This will prevent you losing control of the name, but shouldn’t mean you can forget your registrar login details or renewal date. How likely is it that you will move, or at least change internet service providers within that ten years? Be sure to keep your registrar apprised of new email, street address, phone numbers at all times! Especially that all important Administrative contact email. "WHOIS" your domain registrar? Do you have domain name management console login details? Have you extended your registration to ten years? Your business is worth careful domain name management.

Copyright August 31, 2006 Mike Banks Valentine

Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101 Small Business Ecommerce & Domain Tutorial and offers domain name registration at: http://website101.com/Domain_Name/ WHOIS lookup at: http://website101.com/Domain_Name/Domain-WHOIS-database.html Transfer your domain to another registrar http://website101.com/Domain_Name/transfer_domain_registrar.html

A proper domain name is essential to guiding traffic to your website. If your domain name seems entirely unrelated to the topic of your site, then it probably doesn’t draw the customer base that you desire. However, adding keywords to your domain name can be a driving force for search engines to top a list with your site for inquirers. Your position on the list of sites found based on a keyword search could be impacted severely by a domain name that does not incorporate the correct information.

Stay On Topic

The way to begin is to make sure that your website stays on topic. In other words, if you decide to sell nail polish, don’t get involved in pages and pages of information on nail files. Staying on topic will help you pick out the true keywords that will draw people to your website successfully. If you trick yourself into believing that “nail files” is an important keyword for your site, then you are misguiding potential visitors of your site. Staying on subject keeps every other step simpler.

Narrow the Field

While your site may have several relevant keywords with which to populate the domain name, you’ll want to narrow down the subject severely. You don’t want a domain name that goes on for miles because people can’t remember it. If you are selling nail care products, don’t try to include every product in the domain name. Try to consolidate. Either use the one or two most prominent products in the name or find a way to state your topic in general. Use “nail care” or “fingernails” in your domain name to suggest all products. Or, if you are focused on specialized grooming products for the nails, use “nail grooming”.

Be Unique but Simple

A domain name populated with keywords doesn’t have to be fancy. It simply needs to get the point of the website across in a somewhat unique way. If you are publishing a site about various grooming techniques or types of manicures for nails, you could use something cute like “fingernail tips”. If you are providing a service, you should include the location of your business, especially if the service is to be local and not an internet provision. If you live in Florida, you don’t want someone calling from Oregon expecting service the next day.

It is good practice to review other domain names regarding the same topic as you intend to include on your website so that you can get an idea of how others have attracted attention in the past, as well as what domain names are already taken so you can stay away from those and any others that are too similar. Start by searching the keyword or keywords with which you’d like to populate your domain name; this will return several sites that have already accomplished this. One of these sites may give you the best idea for your own site, and you’ll be ready to get started.

Keith Mallinson is a software publisher who helps web master automate their portal building business. Visit his site at http://www.subdomainwizard.com where you can get unlimited domain names for $97

I have spent the last three weeks working with one of my new clients. They have been building their own website for over three years, spent $20,000 and have virtually no traffic. Like many people on the internet, they saw an opportunity to license some material from another company and did so in the promise they would make money. Yet to their distress they have never ranked well online and have never had high levels of traffic.

This particular client has spent thousands of dollars on building email lists using Adwords to assist in driving traffic their way. They are fast running out of money and becoming very distressed. The client has spent lots of money paying other people to get search engine traffic but has never achieved a good ranking and in some search engines did not even register an existence.

Two weeks ago we worked out what keywords would suit the licensed products that the client had purchased, built a website based on the sales pages the licensor had provided and using the right keywords this client has now achieved the most outstanding results.

The client achieved within 1 week of the site being live a #1 ranking in Yahoo.com on a keyword. A number one ranking is predicted to bring about 50 hits a day. The website also achieved a number 2 ranking in Google.com on a keyword which is predicted to bring about 150 hits a day. The reason our client achieved these outstanding results was simply because of the process we followed in choosing the right and appropriate keywords for the domain and key webpages. I should note that whilst the client will only pull about 200 hits a day on this one key world, we expect to make 3 to 5 sales a day for a $300 product. If you look at the numbers from the best case scenarios, the sales will pull $1,500 a day US which works out to about $10,500 a week and about $500,000 a year. Not bad for one single keyword.

There are four key issues you need to consider when trying to choose the right keywords for your domain name.

Issue #1 – Identify The Actual Words Your Customers are Using To Search For Your Products

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is to not do the research to identify the actual keywords your customers are actually searching on. In fact I have found that often what a client thinks their customers are using to search for their products is totally different to what their clients actually search on.

There are many tools on the market to help you do this and there are new ones coming out every week. My team and I use a range of tools like WordTracker and Overture to develop lists of keywords our clients customers are actually searching on. I find that Wordtracker is a fantastic tool for this.

When you are trying to use Wordtracker, I recommend that you start your searches with just a single general word about your product. This will give you a full list of all the words and a range of important information.

Issue #2 – Identify the Right Keywords with Minimal Competition

When you work with Wordtracker the system will give you a range of information about your keywords including the number of competing sites by search engine, the total number of hits per day in total to expect and a prediction of the number of hits per day by search engine. There are two issues you need to consider. One is the number of competitive sites for the keywords and the second is the number of hits you can expect.

The number of competitive sites is the most important issue to look. Keywords that have few competitive sites are much better to go after than those keywords that have lots of competitive sites as it can take a while to rank well. For example, my team and I have been going after a general term which currently has about 900,000 competing sites. The downside is that it takes a lot of work, lots of articles and a lot of time to achieve a number one ranking. In particular it has taken us 4 and half months to rank in the top twenty and we expect it to take another 2 months to get into the top five.

I know of one company that wanted to rank well for the keywords "wholesale hats" and that it took them 6 solid months of writing articles and building back links to be ranked well in the number one position. When you are starting out, you will want to make sure that you choose low competition websites. Now here is the interesting issue, just because a keyword has 1 million competing webpages does not mean that its going to be hard to rank well. What you need to do is to identify how many backlinks the top competitors has for the keywords. If the top competitor’s webpages have only a few links to their page or even their site then you may find it very easy to top those webpages.

One of the aspects to consider when choosing your keywords is to make sure that your general keywords are in fact included in the domain name. For example if you were creating a website on Asthma, then in your domain name, you would want to include the keyword Asthma but it is unlikely you would get Asthma.com. However you would want to include the term asthma as the search engines give a better ranking to those that have the keywords in the domain, simply due to relevance.

Remember one key issue, the more relevant your keywords and domain, the more likely your website will rank highly.

Issue #3 – Identify Keywords with Good Daily Hits

The next issue you need to look at is the number of daily hits you can expect using those keywords. If the only keywords you can get with low competition webpages have 10 to 30 hits per day, then it is going to be a long haul.

The best type of keywords are those where you have a couple of hundred hits per day, preferably a thousand plus a day and only a few competing webpages. One of the sites we did for one of my clients had 350 daily hits per day but only had 104 competing webpages. This number of competing webpages is minute and it will not take a huge amount to get a top ranking position.

Issue #4 – See What Your Competitors Are Doing With Your Keywords

The next issue you need to look at is which keywords your competitors are using. When you are trying to work out your domain name you need to weigh up what your competitors are using to secure your customers, what keywords they are using in the keywords section of their meta data and what keywords they are using in their webpages and the text in their hyperlinks and their domains.

With all of this information you need to then balance out which keywords will give you the best results. Knowing what keywords your customers are searching on, which keywords have the least competition, what keywords your competitors are using and the total number of hits per day on your keywords will help you choose the right domain.

Oh and there is one other issue in all of this that you need to consider, is the domain with the keywords you have chosen still available?

Look the bottom line is that you want to build sites that are relevant and bring value to your customers and also to the search engines. If your websites do not do that then you will never be truly successful. All of the most successful websites in the world actually follow this credo.

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