First things first. If you haven’t got a domain name yet you will want to register one ASAP. But I hear you saying why not use a free one like on facebook, Google, Yahoo or whatever site?
The issue is that you want to be in control of your website and not left to the mercy of the thirdparty website owner where you have placed your “sub-site”. That does not mean that using third party sites is not a good way of mirroring your site to generate additional traffic. I will post on this in due course.
For example your site might be part of Yahoo and they get bought by Microsoft and they then start a new search engine and call in bing and then they suddenly decide to shutdown Yahoo? Or a bit more realistic Yahoo decides to change their policy of what types of subsites are allowed. And guess what your type is no longer allowed and has been shutdown!
You want to be in control of you web presence as much as possible, there is enough stuff you have no control other in any case so lets hold onto what we can. To find and register the domain name we want we will need to first decide on the Top Level Domain (TLD) eg .com, .de, .co.uk and then register the name we want, being the bit left to the last dot eg name in name.com.au.
Choosing your Top Level Domain (TLD)
.com versus .com.au, .co.uk, .co.nz etc
This will need to be determinded my the market you are going to be operating in. For example I have a website called BudgetHandles.com.au that supplies door hardware to customers located in Australia only, hence the .com.au. By the way the .au or any other country code is referred to as ccTLD. However if you are planning or supply already the international market then you will want to have the .com TLD. Where possible you should also register the .com version just incase you go international down the track. You can then re-direct the .com to your .co.uk or whatever ccTLD you have. In my case I also registered BudgetHandles.com and re-directed it to BudgetHandles.com.au.
.tv, .biz, .id, info and .whatever
All of these have little to no commercial value and are very much preferred by spammers since they are cheaper and often offer short registration periods and some search engines frown upon these for that reason. A little tip on the side is to always register domain londger then the shorts period on offer (eg two years instead on the minimum of one year) since spammers wouldn’t do this and Google might take that into consideration. The only exception here might be if you actually are a TV station, however even then I would register the .com or ccTLD as well and re-direct to the .tv.
.net, .org and ccTLD version of them
These are really the only other two TLDs you want to consider besides the .com and ccTLDs however they are not as valuable as a .com! Also keep in mind that .org should only be used for non-for-profit organisations and not for commercial purposes.
Alright, if you are still with me then you’ll know that we now have decided on the TLD or ccTLD and it’s now time to decide on your name.
Your Name part of Domain Name
This is the bit before the first dot eg in DIYorOutsource.com it’s DIYorOutsource. Another little tip here is that you can use lower and uppercase letters to make your name more readable however you can’t use spaces, the only separator allowed is a hyphen “-”. So I could also have registered DIY-or-Outsource.com. However it seems that the Internet Marketing gurus are saying to not use the hyphen but ti use upper and lower case instead.
What name do you use for your web presence? If you already have a company or brand then you will simply want to register that name and if you don’t then you’ll want to do a bit of research first. In some ways this is a great place to start from since there is no limitation on what your name can be. There are at least three strategies you can follow:
- Come up with your company or brand name.
- Determine what the burning problem you are solving or your uniquie selling proposion and derive your name from that.
- Research the 5 – 7 top keywords in your market and then use a combination of these as your name.
OK all that needs to be done now is to go off and register your domain name. If you don’t already have a registrar use Name-Cheap, they are easy to use, cheap and offer a free whois guard and heaps of other free services with evry domain name registration.
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