Using the results from a domain search can help you to select a good name for your online business. A domain name is part of a website’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Essentially it is the “name” portion of a website address.

Doing a domain search, to see what domain names are available prior to naming your business makes good sense. If it is possible for your domain name to give some indication as to what your site is about or to contain your business name or brand identity, it will much more memorable to return visitors to your website.

A domain search is the first step in selecting your own domain name to purchase. If you are serious about doing business on the net, it really is important that you buy your own domain name rather than using a free one. Lots of web hosting companies offer free domains that include their domain name with your name at the end of it. While that may be advantageous for a personal website, a business site will lose its credibility in a heartbeat if you use a free domain. Your business can also be easily disrupted if the web host ceases to exist or if you decide not to do business when them anymore.

By choosing and purchasing your very own domain name after doing a domain search, you will ensure the stability of your domain and you’ll have a lot more flexibility. Once you’ve completed your domain search and decided on the domain you want, you register it. Even after it is registered, you can change web hosts without having to change your domain name.

Search engines change their rules often about how much weight is given to various components of a website. It’s a common belief that the domain name is given some consideration in regard to how a search engine ranks a website. For that reason, many website owners try to include relevant keywords in their domain name.

To get some good ideas about keywords that may be useful for your domain search, check out Wordtracker at www.wordtracker.com . Wordtracker is a nifty online tool that tells you how popular specific keywords are. It is undoubtedly the best keyword research tool around. When you search for a particular word in Wordtracker, you’ll get a list of suggested keywords and keyword phrases that are similar. The reports Wordtracker generates will tell you the popularity of the suggested keywords and keyword phrases as well as giving you great ideas for niche phrases.

It is best if you can choose a name for your business that has an available domain name in your domain search results. Otherwise, people who are looking for your business by name, may be misdirected to someone else’s website if they hold the registered domain name. If you choose a business name or you have one already that doesn’t use keywords or isn’t terribly relevant to what your website is about, you should still register the domains for your business name. You can also register domain names from your domain search that are relevant and do contain keywords. Multiple domain names can be set up to redirect traffic to your active website when they are input into a browser.

If you really want a specific domain name that is not being used but your domain search shows that it is unavailable, you may be able to buy it from the registered owner. There is a “Who Is” service that you can use to find out who owns a particular domain. To access this resource go to www.whois.sc . Using this domain search service you can find out who the registered owners of a domain are and you can track domains to be informed when they expire and buy them then.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope, fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing advice you’re getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing, or a website owner who wants to make more money from your website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your internet business at http://BiznessTips.com

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Domain Name Registration
Affordable domain name registration was extremely difficult to be found in the past. In fact, all domain name registrars used to charge a flat fee of $70 which was to register your domain name for two years.
Now there has been an explosion of companies that offer affordable domain name registration. Some will register your domain name for less than $15 a year, especially if you are registering multiple sites for a number of years at the same time. Be aware that you may have to have a number of variations of your ideal site name as you often find that the more popular terms have already been registered or reserved for future use.
If you are serious about your online presence then it is essential to consider a bulk domain name registration. The most obvious benefit of having a bulk domain name registration is that your site will appear higher on the search engines. That may be incentive enough but registering as a .net, .biz, .co.uk, .la or other domain names too has a far greater benefit which many people do not think about.
A major benefit of having a bulk domain name registration for your site is to prevent the more unscrupulous cyber sitters from piggybacking on the success of your website. Imagine if you could register as a google.au and benefit from the millions of people who use a Google site every day? You see how this could work to someone s advantage if Google hadn t performed a bulk domain name registration to prevent this. The extra cost to have a bulk domain name registration can be minimal and there are a number of web domain registrars who offer bulk discounts to their customers.
Wholesale domain name registration is an increasingly popular way for webmasters to register multiple domain names at the same time at a fraction of their individual costs combined. A new marketing technique has been sweeping the World Wide Web recently where webmasters create hundreds of websites with only a small amount of text to attract visitors by keyword searches and wholesale domain name registration has led to this process being simplified.

About The Author

Dana Goldberg is webmaster of Webhosting Specialists. Find out everything about web hosting and domain registration. http://www.webhosting-specialists.com
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The first thing you need to do when setting up a web site is to register a domain name. A domain is the familiar “something.com” (the www is not part of the domain name).

Your domain name is a pointer to the actual IP address of your website. They’re used because they’re a lot easier for people to remember than a bunch of numbers would be.

Every website has an IP address, which is a number like 123.456.78.9. The domain name system (aka DNS) translates between those numbered addresses and the corresponding domain names.

Each domain on the internet is registered with a central registry handled by a group called InterNIC which is a subsidiary of ICANN - the organization that certifies all domain name registrars.

Domains names gets filtered through DNS servers, which link the address with the correct domain name. Most websites have a primary and a secondary DNS server - essentially a backup system that increases reliability.

Getting Your Website Set Up

The first step in registering your domain name is to decide what you want it to be. The domain can be almost anything you want it to be, but it will be more effective if it relates to the subject of your website.

If you’re selling shoes, for example, it helps to have a domain name that’s related to shoes - all-shoes.com for instance.

There are a few simple rules for registering domain names. The only characters you can use in your domain are letters, numbers and the hyphen. Domain names can’t be longer than 70 characters, but it’s best to keep them as short as possible.

They can be either upper or lower case - the case of the domain name is ignored by DNS. It sometimes helps to use a combination to make them easier to read. For example, which is easier to read mywebsite.com or MyWebSite.com? Both are the same as far as DNS servers are concerned.

There are a number of extensions available to use with your domain. The most common by far is .com. It has become synonymous with the internet (eg. “The dot com crash”).

Other common extensions include .net and .org. Some of the newer ones are .info, .biz and .name - these aren’t as common however, and they won’t be as effective as .com, .net or .org, which people are more familiar with.

There are also specialized extensions such as .museum, .aero and .coop which are only available for members of certain organizations.

What About Country-Specific Domains?

You can also register domains with specific country extensions such as .us (United States) or .de (Germany). The rules for registering country-specific domains vary from country to country, so you need to check with the registrars for a given country to see if you are able to register them.

All domain registrars must be certified by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). There are many registrars with varying prices. You can get a full list of all certified registrars at the InterNIC website (www.internic.net/regist.html).

Even though registrars are regulated, they’re allowed to offer their registration service through third parties, so most web hosts offer domain registration even if they aren’t registrars themselves.

Domains are registered for at least one year and you can buy as many as ten years when registering. A longer registration contract usually nets you a lower price, so if you know you’ll be using that domain for some time to come it can pay to pay for a longer period.

John Lenaghan writes about how to choose the best cheap web hosting, business hosting and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org.

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