What's Domain
A domain name makes up the address of your site and can end in .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, .tv and more, which we call the Domain Extentions. You have many domain extentions for choice, but the most common one is .com. And each country can have their own domain extention as well, such as ".co.uk" is a domain from UK, ".cn" is for China and ".jp" for Japan. So before you apply for a domain name, you will need to decide a domain extentions for your web site based on your target readers, if it's worldwide, .com is the best choice for you, but if you want to only target Chinese, you can choose .cn (.com is also a good choice since it's so common).
How to Select the Best Domain Name
Below are some tips for selecting a domain name:-
Register a name that contains your major keywords, such as you design
a web site to guide people how to find the web hosting solution, it
would be better to include ‘webhosting” or “hosting” in the domain name,
such “webhostingclue”, “hostingclue”, etc. This should be followed if
being found in the major search engines (Google, MSN, etc.) is extremely
important to you.
Think about it. The average surfer searches by subject, not by proper name. So why it may seem cool to have a name like RaysTool.com for Software development site, you’ll want to choose a name that includes keywords that your target audience would likely use when they search.
So with that in mind, a name like RaysDevTool.com would be much better than RaysTool.com.
If the domain is for a company, you might want to put your company name in domain. I think it’s fine if your company is famous or attracting free traffic to your web site is not important. But keep in mind that you need to advertise the whole domain instead of the feature of your site. Such as if you create a site for webhosting with domain name “whc”, please make sure you promote your site a lot as “whc.com” to increase the influence of Brand “whc”, and usually, it take money and time.
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Very often that you can’t get the domain name you want, someone else
has got it registered. You can try to add “the”, ”my”, or “your” to your
favorite domain name, it’s still a good choice. But people are likely
to forget to affix the necessary “the” or “my”. For that reason, you
need to advertise the site with full domain name, such as
“thewebhostingclue.com” instead of “webhosting”.
Try not to use the plural form of the domain name, it’s more possible that the visitor failing to type the “s” than affix “the” or “my”.
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Don’t register domain names that are too long and have too many
syllables if you can help it. Yes, you can register names up to 67
characters long, but that doesn’t mean you have to use all 67
characters.
You want your name to be easy to remember. Not everyone will bookmark your page initially so try to think of something that can be easily remembered — although I realize this may be tricky since a lot of names are taken these days.
Try to register the short name which is meaningful, don’t make it too abbreviated, such as make webhostingclue to whc, it would be hard to remember and nobody will know what the site is for unless you want to promote whc to be well known brand, and it’s usually very hard and need a lot of money.
Meaningful web site is very important even sometimes it make domain name longer, since it have an advantage in that they fare better in a number of search engines. The latter give preference to keywords that are also found in your domain names. So, for example, if you have a site on web hosting with a domain name like cheapwebhosting.com, it might fare better in a search for “cheap web hosting” than the site like onlinemoneyclue.com.
- Try don’t use hyphens as much as possible. Beside it’s a pain in the
neck to type, the user tend to forget to type hyphens, and when they
forget it, it’s very possible that they will be directed to your
competitor’s site.
But in the other word, the non-hyphenated form may no longer be
available. At least this way, you still get the domain you want. And
search engines (such as Google) can distinguish your keywords better and
thus return your site more prominently in search results for those
keywords occurring in your domain name.
So Personally, I prefer to avoid hyphenated names if I can, but I guess it really depends on your domain name and your situation. Before you register a domain with hyphens, try to think about a alternative domain name.
- Register the appropriate domain extension for your web site. The
answer for it is not as straightforward as you might think. If your
website is to local community, such as you target at the people living
in UK, it would be better that you register after co.uk. And actually,
you will benefit from having such a local domain because the people
there know that they are dealing with a local entity, which is what they
want. Such as: they might tend to order a pizza from pizza.co.uk and
not pizza.com.
But if your website is to international, it would be better to get a
extension as “.com”, “.org” etc. You will get some benefit from it, for
example:
If you get a country specific domain, people might think that your business only caters to that country. But for others, we know it’s internalized.
Each extension has their own meaning, such as .org actually describes the non-profit nature of their organization. And .com is a common extension for all, if you type webhostingclue in browse, it will automatically direct to webhostingclue.com before attempting other extension like “.net”, etc.
As you can see, there are actually good grounds for accepting any domain extensions. My personal footnote to the above arguments is that if you get a domain name with an extension other than “.com”, make sure that you promote your business or website with the full domain name. For example, if your domain name is “onlinemoneyclue.net”, make sure that when you advertise your site or business, call it “onlinemoneyclue.net” not “onlinemoneyclue”. Otherwise people will assume a “.com” extension and travel to the wrong place.
- Protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org,
etc.) This deters people from copying your name. For example, if you own
garden-tips-for-us.com you can also register garden-tips-for-us.net and
any other extension that’s available.
You don’t have to build a site on all the domains, but you can
reserve the others to keep people (copycats) from registering them.
Protect Your Privacy
As you're registering your name, you will be presented with the option of keeping your domain name private - a deluxe feature you'll probably want to take advantage of.A private domain registration will keep your information (name, email address, etc.) out of the global Internet database, and will prevent a lot of spam from reaching your email box.
Even though registering a "private" domain is not mandatory and will not block all spam, I highly recommend you select this option. I certainly wish this had been available when I created my first site. When registering the domain, you might need to pay some additional annual fee (usually about $1 to $2) to get a "private protect" domain, and some of the company even will give it out as free, such as Bluehost. Domain Registration guide will give you more information about where and how to find the lowest price domain name.
