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

When You Mean Serious Business, When You Want to Affirm Yourself As a Professional…

Own Domain and Paid Hosting Vs Free Domains and Free Hosting
By Mihaela Lica

We talk about making money online and we often see sites that intoxicate us with sales pitches that sound like the ultimate online money-making dream. It’s this very dream that comes with a limited offer, and if you don’t “act now” you’ll just see it slipping away. Away it goes. You were lucky this time!

We have get-rich quick schemes, covered even in articles at the Wikipedia, and some probably work. Otherwise how would you explain the birth of a few new “get rich” sites each day? And, attention: there are legal get rich schemes that will burn your pockets even worst than the illegal ones.

When it comes to the Web, the “get rich” idea is not out of the question. What you need to understand is that nothing happens over night and that there is no such thing as “free.” On some sites you get “free white papers” but you need to give them your name and email address to get a download link. On other sites you get “free software” but to fully benefit of its features you have to upgrade to the paid version. Free is a relative term.

And the relativity of the term applies even to web domains and hosting.

Many bloggers start an online business using apparently free resources like Google’s Blogger. Even I have there a few blogs that bring in some coffee cash. Other bloggers are more successful, because they focus more on branding and networking. Blogspot is serving its purpose well, and it is amazing because it is free, isn’t it?

Well, as long as you don’t need to actually pay for your sub-domain (because you do own just a blogspot sub-domain with Blogger) you go on happy that you don’t need to pay for hosting, that you make the best out of a free resource. Without knowing, you actually work for Blogger. You feed its big domain with content, you boost traffic, and you are the very force behind this company’s branding.

The little money you make using this apparently free web spot is nothing in comparison to the win you actually make for Blogger.com. You are the unofficially employed Blogger writer. You publish some ads by Google on your site (which is actually not yours and Blogger.com could delete it at any time as per its TOS) and you are happy with the revenue.

You sell some links (carefully, because you really don’t want Google to manually de-index your site), and you publish some sponsored reviews. But did you know that you could do much better with a small monthly investment?

There are enough web hosts that offer affordable web hosting plans, and some even offer the cheapest web hosting plans I’ve ever seen. The trick is to find them and when you do, take your time to consider the advantages of owning your domain and the advantages of professional hosting versus feeding up Blogger.com on a sub-domain no one will ever remember.

First things first: how many serious, professional bloggers run their blogs on Blogger.com sub-domains (also known as blogspot)? Oh, yes, we have a few who still keep their blogspot accounts just for fun, but we see them blogging assiduously on their own domains. Because they know:

• blogging on your own domain allows for better branding (a carefully chosen domain name is easy to remember and SEO friendly - as you include keywords on the domain name),
• provides for reliability and conveys trustworthiness (a http://seobusiness.blogspot.com/ is less reliable than http://www.seobusiness.com/ - which also gives to the customers a sense of permanence),
• gives you full control over your content,
• you get a professional, domain-branded email address (and people tend to trust such addresses more than any free web-based email accounts - what would you trust more: seobusiness@yahoo.com or name@seobusiness.com?);
• you are free to move your domain from one web host to another, as you please;
• business cards and stationery look more professional when displaying a self-owned domain;

Now that you are familiar with the advantages of owning a domain, what about hosting? If you park that domain free on any web host you’ll get your pages cluttered with their ads. And now we go back to that “apparently free” debate that started this article.

When they publish their ads on your domain they actually monetize the web space they put at your disposal. If with Blogger (blogspot subdomains) you can do what you want, because Blogger only cares about traffic and branding, a free host like GoDaddy wants its web space to make money. And they win, on your work, each month more than the real price of the hosting plan they put at your disposal “free of charge.”

You could put that money in your pocket! For less than $ 4 monthly you get a professional hosting package that will give you full control over your content, Cpanel, MYSQL databases, email accounts, ftp and much more.

Also, some free hosts don’t always allow you to monetize your site as you wish. Look at Wordpress.com which denies you any right to display ads or make money with your blog. Sure, when you are not in for making money with the blog (through ads, affiliates and sponsored reviews), there’s nothing wrong with Wordpress.com. And if you don’t mind being an unofficial employee of Blogger.com, then just ignore this article and do your thing. But when you mean serious business, when you want to affirm yourself as a professional in your field, go buy a hosting plan that has a domain included in the price and make a serious start.

Read other professional articles on eWritings, Mihaela Lica’s SEO Blog. For online public relations services, visit Pamil Visions.

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

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.