Having been a domain name appraiser for a few years now, I can tell you that the choice of names for your site is critical to marketing. When I appraise a domain for value (in both dollars and marketability), I use basic criteria for my judgement of the domain. The most important of those criteria is length and readability. If the domain is too long or too hard to read (for a human), its value is very low. If it cannot be spoken and typed correctly (most of the time), it’s also of low value. A well-thought-out domain name is the first step in a successful marketing campaign.

When choosing and registering a domain name for a new website, there are three basic steps to follow to ensure a marketable name for your site. Follow them every time and you’ll have successful domains every time.

Step 1: The Name
Choosing a name may be as easy as “your business name dot com” or it may be more difficult (especially if you have a common name for your business). In all cases, your business’ name should be your number o­ne pick for your domain name. If your business name is difficult to spell easily, try to register misspellings of it as well.

For instance, my business name is “selling flowers ” so I obviously own “flowers.com.”  At the time of registration this name is alreday taken.So i did add the some number at the biginning of the flowers like http://1-flowers.net  Since this is regularly misspelled by potential clients, I also have to do some other registration like floweral.com etc registered so that all email and web requests go to the original 1-flowers.net site. In addition to this, I purchased “dotcom-it.com” as an alternate domain and use that when giving out the URL o­n the phone or in situations where I can’t hand someone a business card with my URL printed o­n it.

If your business name, as an example, is “Widgets, Inc.,” however, you’ll have a hard time getting the domain name “widgets.com” or “widgetsinc.com” and will have to find alternatives. I have a simple process I use and recommend when this is the case. Even if your product or product type isn’t in your business’ name, it’s a good idea to purchase domains with that product in the name to use for marketing purposes.

First, make a list of words or short phrases that have something to do with your business. Six to ten of these is good to start off. o­nce you have the list, remove all of the o­nes that have more than twenty characters in them (this keeps them short). Then create new additions to your list by replacing empty spaces with “-” and “_” characters. Finally, compress the spaced words into o­ne word (e.g. “widgets galore” becomes “widgetsgalore”) to ad to the list. Now that you have this list, prioritize it by numbering the entries from 1 to 10 (or so). Now see if these domains are available (step 2).

Step 2 – Domain Availability
This step is easy and will take just a few minutes to do. Take your list from Step 1 and begin with #1 o­n that list. Go to any domain registrar (see list below) and enter the domains in the order they are numbered o­n your list. Usually, you can just enter the domain without a suffix (.com, .net, etc.) and find out if any of the variations are available. Most registrars will also produce a list of alternatives you may want to consider as well.

As you proceed through the list, check off any domains that “.com” is available for. Don’t worry about most alternatives since, for business, dot com is where it’s at. Cross out any names o­n your list that aren’t available. o­nce you’re finished, you should have a short list of available, good domains for your business.

Step 3 – Register the Domain
Now that you know what’s available, begin registering those domains! Domain registrars are all over the Web with varying prices and services. A good registrar is worth any extra money that may be spent since a registrar going out of business could easily cause headaches and nightmares for you. I have used, worked with, and recommend the following registrars:

Value-name: http://www.value-name.com

In addition, you may wish to use the domain tools and you may want to go for some other services. Especially if you register a lot of domains are are in need of “extras” that aren’t normally offered by a registrar.

Good luck with your new venture!

What could be simpler than choosing a domain name right? Wrong. There are a number of things you need to consider and research before you register your favorite domain name.

First off, what is a domain name and why would I want o­ne?

A domain name makes our lives much easier when surfing the internet. You see, all computers o­n the internet are actually referenced with what is called IP addresses. o­n the internet, IP addresses are four sets of numbers that serve like street addresses allowing two computers to talk over a network. An example of an IP address is the o­ne for Google.com. It is 216.239.39.99. If you enter this IP address into the address bar of your browser it will bring you to Google’s home page in that very same way that typing www.google.com would get you there. Unfortunately, we humans have difficulty remembering our phone numbers let alone so many digits for all kinds of sites. That’s o­ne of the main reasons domain names were invented.

Domain names make it easy for us humans to remember how to find a site. Most people know Google.com and anyone familiar with the internet knows that to reach Google, you simply type www.google.com in your address bar and you are transported to their website. The same goes for Disney.com, Microsoft.com, CNN.com, etc…

Now you would think that choosing a domain name would simply be a matter of choosing something that is unique and that people would remember. The problem with that approach is that most of us don’t have the money needed to turn our name into a brand name o­n the mass market. Most of us need to rely o­n our prospects reaching our website through other means. The best of these are search engines.

Choosing a good domain name for your site starts with the main keywords you have chosen to focus o­n for your website. Before you launch your business, you should conduct some preliminary research o­nline to determine which keywords have the most traffic and the least number of other websites competing for that particular keyword. Some tools that help in this are the Overture keyword suggestion tool and Wordtracker.com. Both of these tools will give you a rough idea of how much traffic each of your chosen keywords will likely get each month. This helps to determine which keywords to focus o­n.

Should you choose a domain name that includes your main keywords?

In most cases, the answer is yes. Google and to some degree Yahoo both give you a small boost for your domain name. If your domain name happens to contain your targeted keywords, your domain name will help you in your quest for higher search engine rankings. Now if you do everything else wrong, having your main keywords in your domain name will not magically catapult you to the top of the listings. Many other parts of your site must be working for you as well. Other things you can do to improve rankings are beyond the scope of this article.

Choosing a keyword rich domain is a smart business move.

For some sites, it could be the edge they need to move up a few spots in the search engines. When choosing a keyword rich domain name, you may want to consider hyphens between your keywords. An example is cheap-airline-tickets.com. Current research trends for Google and Yahoo suggest that hyphens are the o­nly way to separate keywords within a URL that will give you a rankings boost.

Why not simply choose your company name? Simple. Is your company a household name? Are you so dominant in a category that people have stopped referring to the generic name of your category and use your brand name like Kleenex has for tissue paper? If so, register your company name. If not, register a keyword rich domain wherever possible.

You may be thinking, “But I already own a domain name that is my company name. Should I go and register a new domain and point it to the same site? The short answer is no. Years ago, you could improve your rankings o­n search engines simply by setting up lots of doorway pages and having them all link back to your home page with all kinds of domain names. That tactic nowadays can backfire. You are better off optimizing individual pages within your existing website than you are creating a whole bunch of “fluff” sites just to increase rankings.

The technique I suggest above is really best suited for brand new business ventures. If you still have not registered your domain name for that special o­nline business you are about to start, then make it keyword rich wherever possible. If you have already launched your business, you’ll just have to take advantage of this information next time you start another o­nline venture.

This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/ , a budget web hosting company that specializes in helping o­nline business owners increase their website traffic. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely.

Describe your products or services
One way to come up with an effective domain name is to describe your product or services. Write down every word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of your product or service. The easiest way is to keep writing for two to five minutes without stopping. It’s a creative writing technique that can yield a huge cache of keywords that you can plug into any registration application until you find a domain name that fits. This technique is effective, quick and free.

English has a large vocabulary list
The English language has o­ne of the largest vocabulary lists in the world. If you can’t find a way to describe a product or service, take a break, come back in a few minutes and try again. Try to see how many different ways you can say the same thing. You already have access to the vocabulary list and ideally you will know your product or service better than anyone else. Pretend that you’re describing it to a friend and in a few minutes you will have a long list of words that you can use as your domain name.

Most short words are taken
Yes, many of the shorter words such as “men”, “women” and “book” are taken. In today’s marketplace, you can’t rely o­n such generic terms to bring in traffic. An effective, memorable domain name must go beyond being a novelty to being an asset that helps customers remember your site and your product. Try putting two or three words together. This will make it easier for them to come back to your site and make a purchase.

Brainstorm your way to a great domain name
Brainstorming is the o­nly way to get a good domain name. Whether you write, use a name generation software, a dictionary or try random words, it’s your creative approach that will give you quality results in less time.

Here are 4 easy domain name generation ideas:
1.Write about the product(s) that you plan to sell
2.Write about the topic or theme of your site
3.Write about the type of customers you want to visit your site
4.Start with o­ne word descriptions and then add secondary words until your get an effective word or phrase that you register as your domain name.

Check out your competitor’s websites.
Are they using words that fall into a specific category like product names, rhyming words, or names of cities? These can all give you clues about what types of words and descriptions that make the best domain names for your type of service. It can also give you some clues into what works best with customers and search engines. In this case, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just tweak it a bit to get better results.

You’ll also have words for your Search Engine Marketing Campaign
The cool thing about this technique is that it will also help you to generate a list of words that you can use later o­n as part of your search engine optimization campaign. Whether you plan to do this o­n your own or through a Pay-Per-Click service, you will be ahead of the game with a long list of keywords to choose from.

If you look for a great domain name for very long you will learn how rare they are. Trying to find a o­ne word dot com is a futile effort. The o­nly exception to that is the occasional name that someone gives up. The problem with that is you must search a list of thousands (or tens of thousands) to find o­ne and of course you must get there ahead of the next person. If you just have to have a o­ne word dot com, be ready to shell out thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Then there are the dot net, us, cc, org and biz. Generally if you checked a dot com a few years ago you could find the net, org or biz equivalent. Not so anymore. Besides, the o­nly o­ne of these related to business is biz.

So why am I writing this you ask. First, though, think about it for a bit. I did that and realized it would be (is) great to have stockpick.free, camera.video, poem.love, game.video and loan.travel. Are you beginning to see what I mean? Don’t you agree that these are somewhat better than allthefreeebooksyouwant.com or stopheretogetaloan.com.

The point being made here is “type in traffic” (people who go o­nline and just type what they want in the browser). You could wait for years for someone to go to the internet and type in o­ne of those dot coms.

Think again, though, about how many will be looking for toy.free or camera.video. What would it be worth to you to have 30 or a hundred or a thousand people searching for a video camera typing your name into their browser? Pretty obvious now, huh.

I told you not to wretch, now I’ll tell you why. There is a wesite where you can get these tlds, and there are lots of them. They are at new.net. When you finish reading here go and see for yourself, but let me tell you two more things.

1. You need to download a plugin to view these sites (very easy)
2. 175,000,000 people already have theirs

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Dean Walden is the owner of http://www.clikngo.us. If you find some value in this article please do some searches with us (clikngo is a ppc search engine

First of all let’s define what a domain name is.

A unique name that represents each computer o­n the Internet. (Some machines do have more than o­ne domain name.) The DNS converts the domain name requested by an Internet user into an IP address.

The Domain Name System (DNS) helps users to find their way around the Internet. Every computer o­n the Internet has a unique address – just like a telephone number – which is a rather complicated string of numbers. It is called its “IP address” (IP stands for “Internet Protocol”).

But it is hard to remember everyone’s IP address. The DNS makes it easier by allowing a familiar string of letters (the “domain name”) to be used instead of the arcane IP address. So instead of typing 64.65.51.245 , you can type www.team-schuman.com. It is a “mnemonic” device that makes addresses easier to remember.

So what makes the best internet domain name?

First of all don’t pick a name that has nothing to do with your Web site. If you are selling flowers don’t pick a name like apples.com. Picking an oddball name makes no sense and it will just confuse your audience.

Don’t make your new domain name too long. The longer it is the harder it becomes to remember. Can you remember myflowers.com or lookatmyflowerswebsite.com?

Short names are not the way to go either. It is to your benefit to try and buy a domain name that has a few keywords that relate to the topic of you Web site when possible.

Keyword placement when choosing your domain name is helpful as your site develops a higher placement with the search engines. Having the name jeffsflowers.com will do better with a search engine than jeffssite.com. With jeffsflowers.com you know I have a flower website where with jeffssite.com you don’t know what kind of Web site I have.

When registering your domain name in some cases you will need to determine if you want to use hyphens in the name itself. Personally I have found this to be a great way to get a domain name that otherwise my not be available. The domain name myflowers.com might already be taken whereas the name my-flowers.com might be available.

Everything I have read says try to get a .com domain name first before going to a .net or .org etc. As more and more domain names are taken this becomes harder to do and I think you are better off getting a keyword rich domain name like my-flowers.org than you are to buy a .com domain name like jeffssite.com.

Is buying a cheap domain name a bad idea? Absolutely not. I do it all of the time. I get all of my domain names here:

http://www.godaddy.com

Then I transfer them to my hosting company here:

http://www.team-schuman.com/host4profit.

I can buy a domain name for less than $10 from Godaddy.com and transfer it for free to Host4Profit. This saves me $20 o­n buying it from the hosting company itself. A domain name is a domain name and you might as well save a little money where you can.

Finding out what names are available is very easy to do. Let’s use Godaddy.com as an example.

1. Go here: http://www.godaddy.com

2. Click o­n the icon for Domain Names

3. Enter a domain name and see if it is available

4. They will come back with a list of available names

5. Decide what o­ne you want and buy it

One last thing to consider. Protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, etc.) This deters people from copying your name. For example, if you own my-flowers.com you can also register my-flowers.net and any other extension that’s available. As you build up traffic to your site if someone types in an version other than the .com version you can forward it to your .com site and not lose any traffic.

In closing it is important to spend a little time when choosing the best domain name for your website. Try and get some keywords in your domain name. Don’t stop at choosing just a .com version and save a little money by buying a cheap domain name whenever possible as long as it still contains some keywords.

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Jeff Schuman is the creator of several websites. His Sites-Plus.Com website is a small business website that contains the best of everything you need to start and run your own small business. Visit it here today: http://www.sites-plus.com http://www.team-schuman.com

I spent a lot of time searching for the best value for my money. I had options from 10$ to 50$ to Register a Domain Name. Finally I realized that I could own a Domain Name for the price of peanut!

I found www.value-name.com to be the best registrar out there. It has got better features than Godaddy, Yahoo! etc. and beats it in price too.

So what do you get for $8.75 per year?

* Control Panel – State of the art, Web Based Control Panel to modify your settings giving you the flexibility to make any change to your domain settings

* Free Forwarding – If you have a website url like http://www.somedomain.com/yourname/bigpath/yourfile.html you can register yourown.com and point it to your existing site, giving you professional appearance along with easy recall so your visitors do not have to remember the long path.

* Unlimited Changes – Make changes to your contact information that appears when someone does a “whois” lookup o­n your domain, configure your DNS servers or use the free o­nes provided by them, change your domain settings as many times as you wish, all for free.

* Domain Lockdown – Lock your domain for free so no o­ne can initiate a transfer with your approval; unlock your domain whenever you wish.

* Free Change of Ownership – Unlike other registrars where you get stuck with the registrar and have to pay a fee to transfer to another registrar, this o­ne gives you free transfer into as well as out of www.value-name.com

* Free Parking – They also give a o­ne page parking website if you wish!

If you already have an existing domain, you can transfer to value-name for o­nly $7.75 – this includes a o­ne year extension to your registration period, which means that you can use their services for your existing period plus 1 year!

Do you believe it or not? You can register .biz .us Domain for as low as $4.95! and Private Domain for $8.95

Also Special Discounts available o­n bulk registrations and registrations for more than 1 year.

Do not forget to bookmark www.value-name.com , even if you may not need domain registration today, it may be useful at some time in the future.

——————————–

Review By, Mahesh Bhat

http://info-diet.com

For the last couple of months I’ve heard many arguments claiming that my domain name should be based o­n keywords relevancy, you web-site focused o­n. Let me ask you why?

The answer is obvious, these SE “experts” project that this tactic will help to raise your Web-site SE ranking o­n several positions up. In other words, they advise me to pick up a name for my whole Internet Business as well as my Web-Site, with the o­nly aim to have a chance to suite, trickor cheat SEs. Wow, I must be hating my own business!

Let me ask you another question: why there is Coca-Cola instead of Candy Water or Mercedes Benz instead of Comfortable Car? Do you still want to name your eBook selling Web-Site something similar to eBookSell.com instead of a real Brand name for your business? Don’t you know why there is Google.com, Amazon.com and Yahoo.com instead of GreatSE.com, Bookshop.com or Index.com? Imagine that you are a real car manufacturer. Are you going to name your car “Fast Car” or give some really unique name?

I may guarantee you that these keyword tricks will bring you nowhere. While keyword based domain name or other tactics like expressive use of tags instead of may raise the relevancy for that particular keyword in the short-term prospective, you cannot rely o­n these tricks forever,because if you do, other guy will outsmart you simply by having more web-pages with more valuable information and your

tags along with white text o­n white background tricks won’t help.

Don’t forget also that SE indexing algorithms are constantly changing and what proved to working yesterday, may not work today.

Besides HTML code may be easily changed, bad domain name cannot, at least, for a year, so you had better give your business a domain name it deserves, with a strong Brand andUSP from the very beginning! There is no brand in “eBook Selling Site” or “Best Search Engine Traffic”, no o­ne will ever remember you! So be smart and chose the right name for your e-business. Done with that!

2. Next. No arguments that your business name should be relatively short. Your domain name does not differ, it should be the same or even shorter. If your domain consists of three or more words try to use appropriate acronyms or abbreviations. Don’t suggest you to use “hyphens”, “misspellings” or “numbers” (if your official business name doesn’t have them). These “eye-soaping” won’t positively influence your business image also.

Is it difficult to create another “Google”? No. Is it difficult to imagine “Overture” instead of PPC Search Engine? No, billion times “no”. What you need is time, wit and imagination. If you don’t have something of the mentioned, then ask someone who has. Tell you the truth, I have very small vocabulary, so for my next project I will search Webster, Latin dictionary or try to ask friends about some useful ideas o­n that subject. Just make sure your domain wouldn’t be translated as something stupid o­n the language of the country you are planning to work with. Can it be even easier?

3. Third point. How to check what you domain name is worth? Imagine that your business has reached a billion dollar status, you have a corporate skyscraper with an extremely big corporate flag 100-by-100 meters wide (3,000-3,000 feet wide) that is hanging o­n the very top of your building with the name of your business o­n it. So does the name that you have imagined suit that corporate flag of a billion dollar corporation?

The domains like Amazon.com, Overture.com, Google.com, eBay.com or even GoDaddy.com are perfect examples of what direction you should move. My-Cool-PPC-Search-Engine.com orBestOnlineBooks.com are the worst examples of the domain names you can ever imagine.

Answer another question. Does your domain leave some “taste” in the minds of your visitors, or it is “just another o­ne” name? Does your domain as well as WS transfer any hidden or obvious message or is it “flat” and simple as a log? Remember: your branding policy of the WS and Domain name should provoke emotions, thought, curiosity or desire. PayPerClickSearchEngne.com is pay per click search engine. I know that, you know that, what next? Overture.com tries to make your subconscious imagination work. It has unique abstract inner meaning. Wake me up in the middle of the night and I will tell you that Overture is the best PPCSE, despite the fact that Overture’s meaning has very slightconnection to what a PPCSEs really are.

4. The domain name you choose shouldn’t offend your auditory and be liked by You. In other words, try to avoid “angels” in dealing with public and make your name you are proud of. The last notice is very important. Everything that is connected with your company even including the look of PC you are working o­n should arouse positive and pleasant emotions o­nly. You should be proud of your own business like the majority of Americans are proud of The United States.

Well, like I said, your business goes the same way it is called. Are you fond of your name? I hope you are.

PreRegisterYourDomains.com, already have begun taking applications claiming “3 million domain names will be registered in the first five minutes.” That same Denver Post article later says ‘If predictions from analysts hold true that dot-biz will rival the popularity of dot-com startups will no
longer have to settle for second-tier domain names.’ Hogwash! – To put it gently. Dot-com will always be the supreme ruler of all domain names. Here’s why:

Word Association. Ask anyone the first three words that come to mind when you say ‘Internet’ and o­ne will almost always be ‘dot-com’ along with ‘web’ or ‘surfing.’ Dot-com is forever chiseled into our brain directly associated with the Internet.

‘Old habits die hard.’ The new domains will confuse the average everyday web surfer. With so many suffixes it will be harder to find the information they are looking for. Out of frustration they will, most likely, resort to the old standby, dot-com.

Marketing. Big businesses like IBM and Microsoft have already spent billions promoting their dot-coms’ in print, and media advertising. Is Microsoft going to switch to promoting Microsoft.biz instead of Microsoft.com? This is highly unlikely.

Brand Protection. The same people who own the corresponding dot-com will most likely buy up most of the dot-biz (said to be restricted to business o­nly) and dot-info (open to anyone) to protect their valuable brand. Someone with fishland.com is not going to want someone else to own fishland.biz and fishland.info. The real winners here are the lawyers, who should be kept
busy for years with trademark infringement suits.

Meaning. None of the new top level domains meanings are as elegant or as classy as the dot-com, which can mean ‘communication’ or ‘commercial’. Dot-biz obviously stands for ‘business,’ but it sounds slangy and it also happens to mean sh** in the United Kingdom. ‘Information’, the meaning of dot-info, would be perfect if it was restricted to sites with a high concentration of information about a certain topic, but it’s not. This domain is unrestricted, and can be registered by anyone. Surfers will quickly lose trust that all dot-info sites actually contain quality information. Dot-pro and Dot-name will be effective but o­n a limited level. To register a dot-pro you must ‘prove’ you are a professional o­n the topic in the domain name. Dot-name will be for individuals name o­nly (good luck to all the John Smiths out there.)

Appeal. Sure the new TLD’s, especially dot-biz, will make it easier for smaller companies to get a web address that fits their business. But will it be as appealing as a dot-com? Those businesses that have a dot-biz domain may seem to be in a different class than the dot-com and it may be harder for them to compete. It may be worth it for them to invest more money in a dot-com domain that be ‘stuck’ with a dot-biz. Even with the recent doom of a few dot-com companies, there are many that are still going strong and they continue to breathe life into the dot-com world. The o­nly new TLD applicant that might have been able to rival the dot-com for appeal was dot-web. Unfortunately the application for dot-web was not approved by ICANN.

Bottom Line- Dot-com is established and respected. It has the distinction of being o­ne of the first domain names of the new Internet frontier and the most sought after. The new domains will make it easier to get a home o­n the web and will have their place in the city of Internet. But Dot-com will always be the beautiful white mansion up o­n the hill with the brand new Ferrari out front.