eZinesphere

What You Need to Know About Choosing A Domain Name

Aside from the nuts and bolts of where to register your domain name and purchasing a good economical hosting service, there are a few things to know about buying a good domain name, that only experience can teach. Here are a few tips to get you started on the right foot:

1. Buy only “.com” and don’t trouble yourself with the others. Although the domain name players have gone to some trouble to publicize and market to us about the availability of other extensions such as .org, .net, .us and others…there is still no real reason to buy anything but “.com.”

If you currently have a domain name that is not a “.com,” I strongly suggest you obtain it. Or, if that’s not possible, consider finding a new domain name.

The rationale is simple: if the point of having a website is to get people to visit it, the best rule of thumb is to make it easy to remember. If your customers have to think in order to get to your website, and maybe even have to type in a wrong domain first before they finally reach you…you want to change that so they don’t.

2. Buy your own personal name. What better way to make it easy for your customers to find you? As you become better known online, and as you build your customer database, it will become increasingly important for your customers to be able to find you based on your personal name.

Buying your personal name allows you to build credibility for your brand identity and makes it easy to “Google” you. Ever tried typing in just your first and last names at Google? Try it and see what happens. If you aren’t showing up in the results, you will want to work on this. And buying your own personal name as a domain name is a simple and very effective way to get going.

3. Buy the most common spelling mistakes for your domain. Even if you follow the advice in (2) above, it may be inevitable that some of your visitors will misspell your domain. It’s human error.

So although these may not be obvious to you at first, it’s worthwhile putting your antennae up in order to figure it out. The first hint? If you misspell your own domain name, chances are others will. Be sure to grab the most common ones.

Example: www.Google.com, www.Gogle.com and www.Gooogle.com all go to the same page. Why? Google “gets” that lots of people type in too few or too many “Os” and has set it up so everyone gets to the right place.

4. Double check your domain names for odd or unintentional meanings. This one is a bit mixed, because if your domain name turns out to be something quite funny, it might be just that much more memorable and bring you free traffic. But you may not want to be remembered in that way, and the traffic that results could be a detriment to you. (The wrong target market just clogs up your system, uses bandwidth, and creates customer service inquiries you don’t want.)

So do a double check to see if your domain says something you didn’t expect.

What do I mean?

www.newsextracts.com is actually a clipping service, but could be interpreted to be something rather more racy.

www.whorepresents.com is actually a site where you can find a given actor’s agent or manager, but can be interpreted to be something else.

Last but not least, as with everything online, ebusiness owners have the luxury of easily and quickly asking our customers most anything, including “What do you think is the best domain name for this project?”

So when in doubt, ask your customers what they think. Give them a choice of a few domains you’ve narrowed it down to, and offer a prize of some sort to encourage participation. It works, and you’ll end up avoiding potholes along the way.

Andrea J. Lee coaches entrepreneurs and online business owners. As Thomas J.Leonard’s General Manager, she helped build and manage the largest network and trainer of personal and business coaches in the world. Now the CEO of Andrea J. Lee Group of Companies, she writes, speaks and consults on Marketing, Internet and Business systems. For more helpful tips, visit www.39lessons.com

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Understand the Domain Name System

Ever wonder why DNS systems came into existence? Efficiency. Every computer has a distinct IP address, and the Internet needed an elite method for obtaining these addresses and for managing the system as a whole. Enter ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number manages the DNS root of the Internet domain namespace. ICANN’s role is to manage the assignment of identifiers, ensuring that all users have unique names.

The DNS system is run by a series of servers called DNS servers. ICANN manages the root DNS domains, under which are the top-level domains.
It also manages:

Organizational domains
Geographical domains
Reverse domains

Beneath the top-level domains are other naming authorities such as Nominet, the UK’s naming authority.

How does a DNS Query work?

The process occurs in two parts. Firstly, a name query begins at a client computer and is passed to DNS client service for resolution. When the query cannot be resolved locally, DNS servers are queried.

For example, when a web browser calls the fully qualified domain name www.discountdomainsuk.com, the request is passed on to the DNS client service to resolve the name by using locally cached information. If the query is held in the cache, then the process is complete.

If, however, the query cannot be answered locally, the DNS client service uses a server list (ordered in sequence) to query external DNS servers. When a DNS server receives a query, it first checks to see if it is authoritive for that domain name. If it is authoritive, it resolves the name, and the process is complete.

If the DNS server is unable to resolve the query, it in turns queries other DNS servers, using a process known as recursion. DNS servers make use of root hints to assist in locating DNS servers, which are able to provide the required result. In this way, DNS queries are minimised and the Internet is able to operate quickly and effectively.

A typical query may run as follows:

Client contacts Nameserver A looking for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

Nameserver A checks its cache, but can’t answer, so it queries a server authoritive for the Internet root.

The root server responds with a referral to a server authoritive for the .com domains. NameserverA queries the the .com server and gets referred to the server authoritive for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

Nameserver A queries this server and gets the IP address for www.discountdomainsuk.com.

Nameserver A replies to the client with the IP address.

Queries can return answers that are authoritive, positive, negative or referral in nature. In the event of a negative answer, another DNS server is queried.

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Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd ? A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to http://www.discountdomainsuk.com Clare can also be contacted on clare@discountdomainsuk.com.
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Why You Need That Perfect Domain Name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet”
-Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

A rose perhaps but not your domain name!

Welcome to the dotcom bubble! Here, any successful e-tailer should tell you that there’s more to a name than just the name itself. This article serves precisely that purpose ?against the backdrop of quality domain naming strategies and styles, auctions, speculators and court conflicts, to convince you why your online endeavor needs that perfect domain name.

There’s no point in coming up with that absolutely fabulous idea for online selling plus a perfect site to launch from, as long as you don’t have ‘the’ name you need. Choosing a name that will eventually contribute to your brand equity, profits, internet marketing and above all -your online credibility, shouldn’t be done haphazardly. Especially, since it’s so easily purchased (for a low startup capital), easily maintained and one that, if you choose, may be disposed off at a substantial amount. Intentionally or otherwise, your domain name becomes your de facto brand name, a location or an experience your visitors relate to in the long run. Even if you plan to sell it later on to prospective buyers, it is only an asset! Your challenge is to come up with that one name to funnel visitors through.

Brandmeisters today seem to understand the significance of site names, especially since the emergence of a number of me-too sites. Like a Washington Post reporter put it ? “feature for feature, service for service, discount for discount, even annoyance for annoyance”, a number of sites may turn out to be a close match to yours. Quoting Rebecca Saunders, author of the Big Shot series, “Names have to sound fresh and new even if the site duplicates one already on the net. Names should stir the imagination or otherwise gain the surfer’s attention. Further site name should be as simple as possible, they should be believable, and they should be easy to pronounce, pleasing to the ear, easy to spell and therefore easy to look up on a search engine.” Here’s more on building your handle.

The ‘aha’ name

Domain name consultants will serve you innumerable dos and don’ts on internet domain naming ? a feat that could leave you grumbling with limited choices. Personally, your domain naming methodology need not be absolutely conventional, as long as your imagination is not slave to impractical logic and common sense.

Begin with a paper, pencil and loads of patience. Consider seeking the advice of kith and kin, while you scramble ideas in your brain. Follow closely on what you ought to and ought not to consider. For example, consider characteristics, features, advantages and possibly anything that relates to your products and services. Now try to come up with a domain name that either addresses that one fundamental concept of the site, or that weds two or more key concepts in a single name. All the while, keep in mind, your site’s goals, the image you wish to portray and your target audience. Don’t compromise on your image-how you want your company to be perceived and it’s relation to your core business memorability. Jot down your list of ideas. Then narrow it down to those names you think are most reflective of your products/services. Most importantly, determine if the domain name you like is available and that it doesn’t violate any existing trademarks or copyrights. The last thing you’d want is your hard thought idea of that domain name accidentally offending a fellow netizen. Make sure that it doesn’t mean something entirely different in another language and that you don’t spare chance for the public to associate anything negative with it (easier said than done!). Care for the ins and outs of classic and non classic approaches in domain naming? Read on.

Unless you are a domain name squatter or a start-up capitalizing on domain names – save those tongue-twisters, masqueraded phrases and unpronounceable names.

Your creativity levels, thought and effort should be directed towards one that’s short and sweet. Though, a long name, embedded with your major keywords, can get your site a high search engine ranking, there is no reason you should take advantage of the 67 character limit provided for domain names. Besides, you are too late now. The record of the longest domain name has been set by a Welsh village, with its registration of llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com.

Concentrate on your visitors comfort levels. Leave them no scope for confusion and no loophole to err. Give them a name they can easily guess (without having to quip over the spelling and the location of hyphens) and hopefully, they’ll reciprocate with more clicks.

You could always rely on those prefixes (e, i, net, web, the, my) and suffixes (world, business, company, store). The power of vowels unleashed, you’d generate a potential brand name. E.g. ebay.com, ivillage.com, pcworld.com, smallbusiness.com

Lucky the business if it’s creator has that perfect proper noun to lend his site a name. Atkins.com named after Dr. Atkins and Dell.com after its founder and CEO Michael Dell. A traditional business moving online could capitalize on it’s established brand name. Even acronyms could yield quick domain names. Microsoft is an acronym for MICROcomputer SOFTware and so is Yahoo for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

Targeting search engine rankings ? e.g. Yahoo that follows alphabetic classification of websites ? consider site names beginning with the digit 1 or the letter ‘a’. Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com, cites this as one of his reasons for the name’s choice.

But for those of you driven by the age old myth ? that search engines have a liking for words that are separated by dashes- wake up! Today, when search engines focus on the site content, hyphenated names have no influence. Domain names with or without hyphens is in itself a topic for a forum. A good idea is to register both options if possible and redirect visitors to one site. Walmart.com never let go off it’s original registration (wal-mart.com), even after it changed name. Now both names take you to the same site.

Think of it on a broader angle. A few dollars spend to secure all possible variants of your name (with alternate extensions) will secure your visitors, otherwise likely to contribute to competitor site traffic. More – register possible names your visitors are likely to associate to your domain. The retailer Buy.com registered the domains: “10percentoffamazon.com,” “10percentoffreel.com,” and “10percentoffegghead.com”. Proctor & Gamble is an extreme case of this blanket approach. It registered hundreds of generic domain names relating to all aspects of personal hygiene and healthcare: pimples.com, badbreath.com, underarm.com, diarrhea.com etc. They advertise only one, but use the others to bring traffic, and point all the domain names to one site.

Though generic names can’t be trademarked, are sources of controversy and usually unavailable (if not, costly), your prospective domain name could sound of the genre of women.com, Hotels.com, Furniture.com, Art.com and shoes.com. Nonetheless, the loss of uniqueness in generic names is a serious reason for their unpopularity among namers. Now guess why Amazon was’nt named book.com and ebay not auction.com.

So, if the dictionary lets you down, do not fret to think of words that are arbitrary, previously unheard of and totally unrelated. Yahoo, Google and BlueTooth.com don’t owe their origins to the thesaurus. Sometimes it pays to be whimsy!

allthegoodnamesaretaken.com

In just around 2 years, the number of website names registered has grown from 200 to a voluminous 125,000 per month. And as yet, already over 1.6 million domains have been registered, including the subtitle above! Chances of you finding a 3 character .com domain name unregistered (not on sale!), are thin? very thin.

Here’s the good news. Everyday, around 20,000 domain names expire and get deleted. In addition to the generic domain extensions such as .com, .net, etc. there are approximately 250 different international domains each with their own two-letter country code extension. Speculations of new TLD (Top Level Domain) names include .firm, .store, .arts, .info, .nom, .biz, .pro, .aero, .coop, .museum and .name.

So, don’t settle for the first domain name you think of! Although the supply of domain names is diminishing daily, it’s better to expend more thought at the beginning and save money later. Don’t let the gold rush skate your decision (and later leave you to regret over an unmarketable name). Then again, don’t sit just hatching ideas. Even as you read this, someone halfway across the globe might be beating you to your choice!

Some are just registered by entrepreneurial opportunists hoping to make a fast buck by selling it on. If your choice is taken, the easiest, cheapest and most reliable solution would be to register another name. Did you know that the auction site eBay.com was the second choice of it’s creator after his initial pick EchoBay.com was taken? A good name is a legal name!

Nonetheless, if you own a successful site, that just can’t do without that colonized ideal name, you better ensure your pockets are deep because the owner at the other end knows that there’s nothing quite like the commercial value of a domain name. The highest publicly known sale of domain name was the sale of Business.com for $7,500,000 to eCompanies, a business incubator.

Domain names have been turned into a marketing bargain with its parking capability. A business can register or buy a name for later use. And there are sites that do nothing but park potential names mostly sold for fire-sale prices later on! A Belgian doctor, Dr. Lieven P. Van Neste owns well over 200,000 domain names. It’s a fine pursuit, if you care to keep your distance from brand infringement. In the past, speculators have faced legal charges on trademark violations from the bigwigs (including Microsoft) for having registered microsoftwindows.com, microsoftoffice.com, AirborneExpress.com, CitibankMasterCard.com, HewlettPackardss.com, and Wall-Mart.com. Domain name conflicts that grabbed headlines – Yahoo vs. “yahooka.com” (a marijuana site), Nissan Motors vs. Nissan Computer Corporation. One that caught my personal appeal – Archie Comics company’s trademark driven domain dispute with Veronica.org, a website set up by a loving dad in honor of his 2-year-old daughter Veronica!

From McDonalds to MTV, a lot of press on online brand infringement ( the hijack of popular brand names) has filled the air. Even as I write this, Google Inc. is being challenged the right to use the name “Froogle” for its online shopping service (a New York based carpenter owns Froogles.com – web shopping site).

Each year, about 250,000 cases are decided by the US federal courts. If you have no time to sort it out the good old fashion, you should consider devising a strategic approach for domain naming, reflected in sound corporate policy and executed with effective management. Toady it’s a topic of senior boardroom meetings where competent professionals are assigned to conduct name searches (a less costly venture compared to the possible consequences of dealing with a complaint of infringement.) Take lessons from corporate folklore on the long term effects of a carelessly chosen domain name. People who learnt things the hard way include Art-U-Frame.com that paid $450,000 to acquire the name art.com.

The crux

Your domain name is more than a ubiquity. You have no other billboard or bypass to your site. Statistics prove that direct navigation or guessed URLs account for majority of the traffic to a site (64.43%), much more than the search engines can bring (35.55%). Eat, drink and sleep on your idea before you move to register that killer name. Don’t hassle, thinking there are nodomainnamesleft.com (that’s taken too!). Your share of homework should save you a lot of misery down the road.

Besides, if you can’t trademark your design scheme, product idea and marketing strategy, here’s something you can. Your domain name is perhaps the only thing that you can own on the Internet. Remember, there’s always more to a name than just the name itself! Happy naming!

Liji is a PostGraduate in Software Science, with a flair for writing on anything under the sun. She puts her dexterity to work, writing technical articles in her areas of interest which include Internet programming, web design and development, ecommerce and other related issues.

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How To Get A Lot of Visitors

If you will target the wrong keywords with your SEO campaign you will lose the battle even before it begins. Nowadays you can not expect to rank for broad match highly competitive keywords like “web hosting” or “dating” – the sites that are on the first page of Google (and that should be your primary goal) are several years old and have tens or hundred of thousands backlinks, it is almost impossible to outrank them with a brand new website within a short period of time.

On the other side, it would be easy to rank on the first place for the phrase “cool and stupid shoe widgetization” but who will search for that ?

So our goal is to find long tail keywords that are related to your website’s theme that have many searches per month and low competition. All the SEO gurus are calling that “niche marketing”. Niche marketing is the way to go for us webmasters that don’t have 7 figure budgets and a staff of hundred people to back up our SEO campaigns.

There are unlimited amount of niches that you have never heard of. Niches like “shiny steel can openers” and “dstt cards”. “World of Warcraft mining guide” and “fish oil supplements”. Find such a niche that is not too competitive, do a proper keyword research, write content around that topic and voila – you have got a niche website that is getting easy traffic and hopefully generates some money. Not all niches are money makers though but a lot of them can make money with Adsense or affiliate products. If there is no product you can create your own ans sell it, but that is another topic.

We will stay on track with the keyword research. There are a lot of keyword tools out there that makes our life easier.

As an example, let’s assume we have a website that is selling baseball bats. Now if you thought that your goal is to rank first for “baseball bats”, good luck with that. Your goal is to rank for a lot of low competing keywords related to baseball bats.

Now let’s see what Google can tell us about baseball bats. Goto the Google’s keyword tool that will provide us with some tips:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter “baseball bats” (WITHOUT quotes) in the keyword field, enter the captha string and press “Get keyword ideas”. You will get a lot of related keywords among with number of searches per month on the Google network. Cool eh ? Now click on “Global Monthly Search Volume” to sort it by the amount of searches per month.

You see that the top searched term is baseball bat (surprise!) 450.000 searches per month is a lot of traffic if you rank first. All numers can vary depending on your location and time but this is just an example. Now let us check the competition for that term. Go to Google’s search and search for “baseball bat” (again, WITHOUT quotes). Whoa ! “Results 1 – 10 of about 16,600,000″. Ok, but actually that is not the real amount of competing sites exactly for that search term. That means 16,600,000 pages have both or only one of the words “baseball” and “bat”.

Now let’s see how many pages are containing exactly this keyword phrase “baseball bat”. Search for it WITH QUOTES this time, exactly like “baseball bat”. 3,800,000 results. Much better but still almost impossible to beat.

Let’s get back to Google’s keyword tool and see what terms people are also looking for. The more searches the better of course. Two or three word combinations that are getting a lot of searches are much easier to rank for. Hmmm, “senior baseball bats” ? Let’s check that one. It is still getting around 4,400 searches per month so if you COULD hit the #1 on Google for that, it would mean like 50 – 100 free visitors per day (it always depends on the niche, how appealing your page title is etc etc, but you got the idea).

Search for “senior baseball bats” in Google (WITH quotes). What? Only 4,710 competing pages? Cool! Now let me tell you what – with this number of competitors you can hit at least the first page of Google within two weeks.

Do a dedicated page for “Senior baseball bats”, make sure this term is once in title, once in description, once in <h1> tag on page and 2-3 times within your on page text. Don’t overdo it though and make sure the text still reads nicely. You don’t want to scary off your visitors with a bad written copy. List all your bats that are suitable for seniors on this page. Link to that page with the link text “Senior baseball bats” within your site navigation and place some links to that page from other websites with that links text (I recommend to alternate it a bit tough, like “Baseball bats for seniors”, Senior baseball bat” etc). Link building will be another topic within my email series, so stay tuned.

Ok, now rinse and repeat. Build pages around other keywords on your theme. Try to dig deeper. Enter “Senior baseball bats” into the Google’s keyword tool and see what will come up. Build pages for these keywords if they are worth it. Study your traffic stats. You have a page about senior baseball bats but a lot of people are coming to your website while searching for “Senior wooden baseball bats” because you rank on the 6th place for that term ? Build a page about senior wooden baseball bats. There is gold hidden in the traffic logs.

Ideally, you are looking for 2-4 words combinations that have more than 10,000 searches per month and less than 20,000 competing websites – usually it is fairly easy to hit the first page of Google with these. Although it is also depending on factors like your niche, how much you are making per visitor etc. Just try it out with and easy keywords and with a harder one to figure out your range.

Even if there are a few competitors, always check the sites that are on the first page. Authority sites like Wikipedia, university sites and such usually have tons of backlinks and are hard to beat

Check if there are some Google Adwords ads for your keyword – if yes, that usually means that this keyword converts. And that’s what we want, right? But don’t freak about it – keep in mind that Adword ads might be targeted only to some countries and you won’t see them depending on where you live.

Google search numbers might not be very accurate but will give you a basic idea about a popularity of a keyword. Another good keyword research tool is http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ – it might give you more keyword ideas.

This tool can do a lot more than just keyword research – it will help you to profit from article marketing, Yahoo Answers, Squidoo etc. Do yourself a favor and watch the free videos that are available on their website:

Micro Niche Finder

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