Choosing Domain Name

Domain name is a very important aspect of your website, just like your name is an important aspect of your life and self esteem. Once settled, domain name can be very difficult and expensive to change because:

Website users and clients accustomed the old one.

Campaigns running are connecting to the old domain

Search engine optimization - usually involves many hours of submitting your URl to various indexes and search engines. Once you change URL you must start almost from zero.

Recreating all the incoming links to your new domain
Picking domain resembles picking location for your business. Just as you will not open a luxurious jewelry boutique in the middle of a slum , you don't want your business domain carry a name like shop-for-great-jewellery.com .

If we examine the most popular websites in the net , we won't find many with domain of more than 8 character because domain must be accessible. Accessibility is better if :

A domain is as short as possible

Domain resembles a generic word

Domain does not contain characters like "-" and " _" .

Domain does not contains complex word/number combination like open0698.com

Domain is easy to spell. For example if i told you someone go to domain site123.com most of the chances he would be able to spell it correct.

Domain doesn't resemble other website domain.

Picking a suffix is also an strategic decision. If you refer world-wide, you better buy .com domain because it is the most popular domain suffix in the world. Domains with .net are far less popular therefore you better compromise on a name but not on a suffix. If you represent non profit organization you may considers .org.

If you have a local business you better prefer local domain, like .co.uk . These domains are little more expensive but worth the money because local search engines prefer them over .com and because it gives you a better branding in your country. Large businesses that refer to many countries should consider buying multiple local domains instead of one multi language .com domain. Nevertheless, if you bought a local domain, you should consider buying .com too , in order to prevent leakage to another website.

Remember that good domain names are being taken very quickly; therefore you better precede and purchase yourself a good domain name while it is available

How To Point Your Domain To A Different Webhost

Your website or web address can be called a domain name, and is utilized for your web site as well as for email accounts and to FTP files. You can register a domain name as long as the network solution or server does not show that it is already taken. When you go to register a domain name this is checked automatically. You may also buy existing domains that someone has let expire through expired domain specialty companies.

It is also possible for you to transfer any name that is already active by a web host to a network solution specialist. The process to pint a domain name to your hosting account from a network solution account is somewhat easy.

You can also have many different name extensions for your domains under one domain provider or network solution. It is very important to protect your accounts from being hacked and a program by the name of Domain Protect does this by monitoring and not allowing any name transfers to take place that you have not authorized. Make sure that you provider offers this service to keep your domains from being pirated.

Another tip I would like to give you before we get into how to point your domain to another host is choosing a domain. When choosing a domain do not allow yourself to be prideful, by that I mean don?t choose your name for a business website. I think that everyone should own their own name if possible but not for use as a business website.

For example if you are looking for a mortgage company are you going to look for bobsmithmortgage or wefinancerealestate? Which one makes more sense for a mortgage company to use? Get creative and use the keywords people will be looking for, if you are selling real estate in a particular town try to use the town?s name in the domain, like navarrepropertyforsale or navarrerentals, etc. This is easy to do and will get you much more traffic in the long run.

Now, on to pointing your domain to a new web host. Let?s say that you have registered your domain name with a registrar like Godaddy. You simply log in to your account and look for the domain that you want to edit, then find DNS management. Once you are here, you will see a series of numbers beginning with DNS, replace these numbers with the ones that you get from your hosting company. In most cases you will only have 2 sets of numbers and they will begin like this, DNS1, OR DNS15, etc. But you will have to choose at least 2. Save your changes and wait for about 24 hours in most cases for the change to propagate across the internet, that?s all there is to it.

Traffic Generation from Expired Domains

If you are like most webmasters you have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get your share of online traffic. Chances are that you have probably invested money and time on search engines, classifieds, banner and text link advertisements and e-mail safe lists. Did these methods of promotion bring your website the flood of visitors you were looking for? Would you like to know about an easier more cost effective way to significantly increase your flow of traffic almost over night?

There is a very good alternative to these promotion techniques that is very effective in generating traffic for you. What if you could find a way to gather an already existing traffic base that is, for the most part, overlooked and direct those visitors to your own website? It is even very possible to have traffic coming to your website from such places as DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Not only can this be done legally and very quickly, but it can be achieved for a fraction of the cost of the other traffic generation methods previously discussed.

This truly powerful method of increasing your traffic deals with the use of expired domain names. Each day there are over 3 million website visits that are completely lost because of expired domains. Why does this occur and how can you benefit from it?

Domain name registrations must be renewed at periodic intervals, most often this is yearly, in order to remain active. If the registration renewal is not paid the domain name will expire. When this happens the domain name becomes available for others to purchase and use.

Profiting from expired domain names is about reaping the rewards from the time and effort that a previous webmaster put into a site before it expired. Expired domain will often have link popularity (backlinks from other websites), Page Rank, and be indexed in the major search engines. Often the URL will also be included in paid web directories.

You can make use of expired domain names by either maintaining the website with your own content and links or by simply redirecting the would be visitors to one of your other websites. If you choose to use redirection keep in mind that a domain name with a similar theme to your own will work best.

There is another way that you can profit from expired domain names. Many entrepreneurs will pick up popular domain names that have expired and resell them through forums, online domain name agents, or even sell them at auction on eBay.

Thousands of domain names are expiring every day. Finding the best domain names to register by yourself can be a time consuming task. The good news is that there are companies that offer services to help you locate the expired domains that you need. They provide categorized and searchable listings of available domains and can even provide alerts directly to your e-mail inbox keeping you informed about newly expired domains.

If you need a truly effective method of generating web traffic or you just want to speculate on domain names to resell at a profit expired domain names are your key.

Multiple Domain Name Penalty

If you own a web site AND you have multiple domain names registered, you might want to read this with your full attention. There are a great many web sites out there which, by inappropriate use of multiple domain names, effectively cripple their search engine rankings by blatantly breaching search engine guidelines!

Site owners often register more than one domain, and there are sound reasons for doing this, including;

- The main URL includes a keyword phrase but is?too long to type quickly, so a shorter, cryptic one is utilised and maybe is also used on business cards and letter heads.

- You take various versions of domains to prevent competitors from grabbing them - dot.com, dot.co.nz, dot.biz, dot.info etc, and point them all to the "main" site.

- You take various country versions - dot.co.nz, dot.com.au, dot.co.uk because you are going to expand into those markets - but in the interim you point them all to the "main" site.

There are also misguided reasons for doing this, including;

- Having multiple domains pointing to the same location in the hope that the search engines will be duped into indexing ALL of them as different content, giving you lots of top rankings under different domains.

Search engines hate duplicated content with a passion... but their automated spiders and bots cannot determine which category YOU fall into - uninformed and innocent of intent, or deliberately and knowingly manipulative. So all sites who transgress can expect to be treated equally. And yes, you can be banned from the SE indexes for getting it wrong!

The search engines do not give out many guidelines - in fact they are all very coy about giving too information much away. However, when they do make a statement by way of guidelines, regardless of how politely it is worded, you had best sit up and take notice because they are really, really serious about it!

Google Guidelines on Multiple Domains

In the case of Google, their Webmaster Guidelines are unambiguous! E.g. on this page; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Google are quite clear on this;
Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content

What This Means to You

There is a clear and present danger in having multiple sites pointing to the same location?if they load exactly the SAME content -?this is a SERIOUS breach of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and is expressly FORBIDDEN because the search engines can only interpret this as a blatant attempt to generate duplicate content under different URL's.?Regardless of your actual intentions in this, its likely to result in a BAN from search engine indexes. :-) Not a good start to an online presence, right?

Ignorance of The Law is No Excuse

Ignorance of search engine guidelines is not a valid excuse either! Unfortunately, many web?designers and hosting companies are blissfully unaware of the?correct way to implement multiple domain names. The result is that many web site owners unknowingly jeopardise their site's inclusion in the search engine rankings.

My advice is that if you have more than one domain name, you check how its been set up. If your have two domains; www.domain-no1.com and www.domain-no2.com and BOTH load the same pages but with the different domains showing, then you have a problem. If you can also load the sites as http://domain-no1.com and http://domain-no2.com then totals 4 different ways of indexing the SAME content!

The Right Way to Do It?

That said, it IS permitted to have multiple domains pointing to the same content BUT it may only be done?via the use of a Permanent 301 Redirect being applied to the secondary domains, e.g. typing in?the URL for any of the secondary domains will redirect you to the main site. This change can easily be implemented, at no cost other than a few of minutes of time.

In this example, www.domain-no2.com is redirected to www.domain-no1.com and and neither visitors nor SE spiders ever "see" content under the secondary domain name. The same logic should also be applied to the non-www versions of both domain names to complete the process and to prevent potential conflicts with the search engines.

Domain Name Generator

Here comes another innovation in the field of domain names with the emergence of the domain name generator. If you are familiar with the domain name generator, it is a general view that the domain name generator is a program that can generate the chosen domain names typically from the provided keywords and by using particular theme or domain name category.

Since the domain name generator's primary function is to generate the desired domain names, the domain name experts have considered that it is indeed a very tough task to generate domain names with the absence of a special software tool that could make the functioning of the domain name generator easier and quick. Some of the experts even considered such absence of the software as a real nightmare.

But what really is the main reason that they designed such software tool for the domain name generator?

For so many reasons, the domain name experts designed such software tool for the domain name generator with a primary purpose of providing a much flexible and private service for the domain name holders in which many of the web-based services simply cannot offer. As such, they named their software for the domain name generator as "Available Domains Pro".

Speaking of this software tool for the domain name generator, it is considered that this software is a feature-packed, convenient and fast domain name checker that locates catchy domain names for personal or business web sites and then manages them. And in terms of the domain name generator with this software, the domain name generator then can function well and give the expected outputs to the domain name consumers.

For the domain name generator's function, it is considered that for the domain name generator to generate domain names, the effort of the domain name consumers is highly needed. So to mention, the domain name consumers should feed the domain name generator with the necessary keywords and optional domain category or theme. Then, it is important to click the generate button for the domain name generator's function. After such steps, it is given that the domain name consumers should then check the resulted domain name list for or soon to expire available domains. And in terms of those soon to expire domains, it is considered that the lookup link popularity should be clicked for soon to expire domain names and as domain name consumers they have the right to snap those domains if they are really great. And one-last strengths of the domain name generator with the software is that it can predict Domain Deletion Date, so the consumers can track domain names that delete soon.

Getting Cheap Domain Registration

With the phenomenal growth of the Internet, information access and other communication has been made a simple thing. How information stored in the online world? They are interlinked to form a huge web thus World Wide Web. The way we access this information is by giving particular location or address to our software or in simpler terms, transport. The last part of this address is the domain that has been assigned to that particular section of information or web site.

So what exactly is a domain? A name that is entered into a computer (e.g. as part of a Web site or other URL, or an e-mail address) and then looked up in the global Domain Name System, which informs the computer of the IP address (The exact coded location of the information on the net) with that name.

Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD) name, which is always either one of a small list of generic names three or more characters, (com, net and org) or a two characters territory code (ca) based on ISO-3166 (there are few exceptions and new codes are integrated case by case). We need to understand that although the I CAN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has the overall management of all the domains. Governments of each country manage all of the domains in each.

Why is it important? Without a domain like dot com, dot net and dot info it is impossible to own web sites and e-mail accounts. People need to purchase and reserve their domain names before they are taken. For example, if you wanted a site who's address was world.com then you would have to register and reserve that address before some one else took it. When you are reserving the address, remember that you are only reserving the first part. That is world. The last few letters like com net and info are owned by every one as they are assigned by the I CAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Now that you understand domains, let us look at on how to own one? Earlier, domains were expensive. They still are from some sites. However if you buy wisely, then you can save some big bucks.

First decide if you need a hosting package with your site. If you do so, buying everything together might be a good deal. Look for a good web host provider with all the features you want at a good price. I recommend squarebrothers.com. They are cheep and affordable. They offer a nice package of 25 mb of space and domain for $15 per year.

Now if you just want a domain and want to point it at a free web space provider like fsphost.com and c topcities.com, then you can choose adimeadozen.com or active-domains.com. They offer good rates and reliable features.