Tips To Consider When Choosing a Domain Name

Getting a Domain Name
By Bogdan Enache

Visitors will find your website by its domain name. The domain name has two parts: the name + the extension (.com, .org, .co.uk, etc.). A domain name which is meaningful and easy to remember is a great asset. With almost all “good” domain names taken nowadays it’s hard to find a good name.

As the title of this article suggests, the website name should be also the domain name of the site. When people think of your website, they think of it by its name. If your website name is also your domain name, they’ll automatically know where to go. What happens if your site is called “HostingProfs”, yet your domain name for it is myhosting.com? Your customers, recalling that they visited a site called HostingProfs, will type hostingprofs.com in the address bar of their browser and they’ll end up on another site and you’ll loose a sale.

There are a few tips to consider when choosing a website name (also known as the website address, URL or domain name):

1. Try and get a name that is related to your business, your products or your services. For example try to find a domain name which includes your company name or your product name, because that is the first thing that people will try in their browsers. This is also a good practice when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Having a popular or meaningful keyword in your website name, will help your website rank higher in the searches results for that keyword;

2. If you can’t get the domain name you want, consider alternative forms of the name you typed. For hosting.com for example, consider besthosting.com, myhosting.com, webhosting.com, thehosting.com and so on. But be careful here, as some alternate forms might chase away visitors. For example if you consider naming the site cheaphosting.com, some people might associate the site with only cheap and maybe non-professional hosting offers.

3. Very often you’ll find the .com domain taken but the .net, .org or country specific extension domain free. The .com extension is the most popular and most used domain extension so it’s preferable to get a .com domain name. But if you can’t get the .com domain name you want, then you might want to consider other extensions. It’s better to have for example, a meaningful and easy to remember .net domain than an obscure .com domain that is not related to your business, or it’s not easy to remember. Country specific domains (such as .co.au, .us) are also popular within individual countries. If you do business in the United States, getting a .us will create a local branding and attract more visitors from U.S, but in the meantime might restrict the flow of customers from other countries. The only draw back for a domain name ending in other extensions is that people are so used with websites ending in .com that you might loose some visitors to your “fellow” .com website.

4. If you found that .com domain name you were looking for, consider buying multiple domain names for the same website. The idea is to protect yourself against the competition. So, if you have a site about search engine optimization (SEO) called bestseo.com, you’d be interested in getting best-seo.com, bestseo.us, bestseo.net and perhaps other similar URLs containing the desired keywords. This way you can prevent other sites from popping near your name. The same idea goes with getting “typos URLs” for your site. What’s a URL typo? Here’s a simple example: what do you think is the most common typo for google.com? You’re right! It’s gooole.com. Try and type google.com and see where you’ll end up. Some SEO experts will say that this is not good practice but it’s ok to have multiple domains for your site as long as you redirect them to your main site using the 301 redirect code.

The conclusion is that you need to get your domain name before anything else! Even before starting the work on the website itself. To register your domain you need to do it with an ICANN accredited registrar.

The author is the webmaster of HostingProfs.com, a website dedicated to providing free information about web hosting, hosting terminology and guidelines to follow when choosing a web hosting package.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bogdan_Enache

Blog Hosts: Free vs. Subscription

Every blog ‘exists’ somewhere. It may be on a server dedicated to nothing but blogs or it may be on privately-leased space a half a world away from the blogger. But in either case, the blogger needs to create his Blog Empire somewhere, and that somewhere will have implications for your blog as it grows into a household name.

Blog Learning Center recommends that you own your own domain name and use a paid webhost service to ensure that you:

• Have complete control over your content.
• Have a credible and professional image for branding.
• Have freedom to monetize your blog.
• Have freedom to move your domain from one host to another.
• Have access to 24/7 support.
• Have adequate bandwidth, disk space, and data transfer.

Free vs. Subscription

With the popularity of blogs exploding, a large number of blog-specific servers and companies have arisen to meet the demand for fast and easy blog creation. Many of them provide software that allows the blogger to quickly and easily set up a blog, sometimes in mere minutes. They allow certain modification (colors, columns, etc.) and provide tools that can have your blog looking sharp, even if you’ve never typed an entry in your life.

But they have drawbacks as well, especially for blogs that are more than just an online diary. They may not provide statistics. They may not allow you to host your own ads. They may even drop your entries once those entries roll off the front page. The solution, in many cases, is to pay a subscription fee which will free up features you need to make your blog profitable, unique, and professional.

Here’s a list of some of the more popular blog-specific sites:

Blogspot: Blogspot features free blogging and image hosting, and provides a very user-friendly interface. Those who understand HTML will be able to create nearly any layout they desire.

Blog-City: One of the easier blog-specific sites to use, Blog-City offers a wide number of pre-made layouts that do not require HTML knowledge to use. Functionality is limited, however, and some features are only available to those who pay an annual subscription fee.

Blog Drive: Blogdrive offers free blogging with objects such as tagboards, RSS feeds, and ready-made header graphics. Blogspot: Blogspot features free blogging and image hosting, and provides a very user-friendly interface. Those who understand HTML will be able to create nearly any layout they desire.

Xanga: is dedicated toward the “online diary” end of the blogosphere. It offers free but limited image hosting and WYSIWYG editing, but downloadable archives are only available by purchasing a premium subscription.

Each host – and there are many others - has many unique attributes and prices, and before you decide to use one of them, it’s wise to become familiar with what each offers. By the time you’ve finished this course, you’re going to know precisely what features you need to build your Blog Empire.

So review each host carefully; if it turns out they don’t offer what you need, it’s often difficult to take your traffic with you when you move.

If you choose a free host, one of the first issues you’ll deal with is the blog’s URL.If you choose Blogspot, for example, your URL will look something like “elborak.blogspot.com” with “elborak” being your blog’s name. That name must be unique across the host, and with millions of blogs out there, that’s not an easy task. And if your blog is named, “Spackle News,” it’s going to be harder for readers to find your blog at “spacklenews.blogspot.com” than if the name is “SpackleNews.com.” Fortunately, there are a few solutions to that problem.

The first solution is to use a forwarding service. You buy a fitting domain name for a few dollars a year, and the forwarding service will actually will forward your traffic from SpackleNews.com (or whatever your blog name is) to your blog. You can even decide to view your blog within a frame, so the URL appears as SpackleNews.com, while the browser is pulling data from another server. Frames do have the problem, however, of “holding” any document you link to within that same frame unless you do some fancy coding. That makes it harder for the user to escape or find specific data on your blog, a situation which neither of you will appreciate.

A second solution is to choose a host that will allow you to directly assign a URL to your blog even as it remains on their server. Be sure to check the features of any blog host you examine to see if they offer the ability to assign your own URL.

A best and final solution is to simply to purchase a domain name and webhosting. Then install a free application such as Wordpress to manage your blog.