Considerations When Making A Domain Name Purchase

When making the choice of a domain name purchase, you should consider a few important steps before actually making your choice and purchasing that domain name.

Just by doing some testing can make or break you whole website before you even make a domain name purchase. Review the steps below before preceding to purchasing your domain name of choice.

Step 1 - Keep the domain name short and simple.

You want the domain name to be short and sweet, easy to remember. If you domain name is easy to remember you will get more traffic to your site. A fair majority of your visitors will also type the domain name directly into the browser, so it must be easy to spell and short. It should be no longer then 3 or 4 words.

Step 2 - What to do about separators?

Resist the urge to put any type of separators such as dashes or underscores, this is a problem for those people who type the domain name directly into the browser. Most people type it without a dash or any other type of separator. Most people that recommend sites will not include a dash, just the name. It can also be a pain to type.

But if you still want a domain that has already been snatched up, here's the upside to using dashes, you will be able to get the keyword phrase that you wanted. Plus the search engines will look at the words between the dashes as separate. So for example, instead of just targeting "domain name registration", you will be targeting that entire phrase plus "domain", "name" and "registration".

Step 3 - Buy a .com domain whenever possible

A .com URL is the most common type of domain. Also by using a .com domain name you will benefit from people who search directly in the browser address bar. Example: If you search "godaddy" and hit enter/search, you will automatically go straight to www.godaddy.com

Step 4 - Brand your website

Keep your website name and domain name the same will make it easier to brand your website. By having a domain name being about one thing and then seeing your website name being another, could cause problems with visitors thinking it was about one thing and now it's not.

4. Buy the multiple related product category names (in addition to your main domain)

By purchasing domain names about products names related to your category, you can attract better search engine rankings and generate more traffic. Whether you decide to have a separate website setup for those domains or if you point them all to your main domain.

Also you can choose to purchase a domain name that customers tend to spell wrong, many people spell badly, why not take advantage of it. You could purchase these misspelling and redirect them to your main site. Example: Goggle.com could redirect to Google.com

Review of Domains Yahoo!

I have been looking for to register a new domain recently, and have signed up with domains Yahoo! If your looking in to registering a new domain name, you should check out Domains Yahoo! as they have a lot of key domain features available including:

- 24-Hour Toll-Free Customer Service
Get answers anytime you need them from extensive online help sources and our 24-hour toll-free customer support

- Domain Management
Set up and manage your domain with our easy-to-use control panel.

- Private Domain Registration
Help protect yourself from spammers and telemarketers with private registration. For an extra $9 per year, you can keep your domain contact information private

- Starter Web Page
Publish basic information on a placeholder web page — until you're ready to upgrade to a full web site.

- Domain Locking
Safeguard your domain from hijacking and unauthorized transfers with domain locking. Yahoo! Domains secures your domain for you — and only you.

- Domain Forwarding
Point your new domain name to a web site you already have with domain forwarding. This is a useful feature if you own multiple domain names.

- Complete Domain (DNS) Control
Advanced users: You can easily edit your name servers and MX, A, and CNAME records for complete control over your domain.

- Email Forwarding
Unlimited forwarding of messages sent to your new domain name into your free Yahoo! email account.

- Room to Grow
It's easy to add more services as you need them, such as email that matches your domain, a full web site, or an online store.

What is a Domain Name?

Imagine that everybody in the world used their Social Security number or their telephone number instead of their name... If names didn't exist, you'd be forced to invent them, or you'd never be able to identify your closest friends, let alone casual acquaintances you'd met only a couple of times!

Domain names were invented to fill a similar need on the Internet. Most computers connected to the Internet are identified by a unique number called an IP address (for instance, 234.208.12.129). IP addresses are neither intuitive (they don't correspond to a geographical location) nor easy to remember (you can prove that by glancing away from this page and then trying to quote the example IP address above!)

If you type the IP address into the URL bar of your browser you will be taken to the web site it relates to. As well as being hard to remember, however, IP addresses are also FIXED (i.e. if you change web hosting companies you'll need to get a new IP address for your site).

Domain names offer a more intuitive way to name and find a website. Each domain name replaces a string of meaningless numbers (an IP address) with a simple word or expression. That's the theory - in practice, domain names can be pretty obscure too.

The Structure of a Domain Name

Let's look in more detail at a domain name, using this site's domain name as an example. This site's domain name is igoldrush.com - you can check this easily by looking at in the URL or location bar of your browser.

.com is the top domain under which my domain name is registered. There are heaps of different top domains out there, from commercial (.com) through to non-profit (.org) and even country-specific top domains such as France (.fr) and Italy (.it). Every domain name is registered under a top domain of some kind. The top domain is often known as the domain extension - these are the same thing, so don't get mixed up!

See here to learn more about sub-domains