Domain Registration

Domain registration starts with searching for a domain name – the chosen name for your site on the web. In other words, the ‘www.yourname.com’ that people will type in their browsers and see at the top of every page of your website. Obviously, it’s important to choose a good domain name.

Many people don’t realise, but the web has a lot more domain registration top level domain (TLD) possibilities than just .com addresses.

.com is the most popular choice for domain registration and is primarily intended for companies – the ‘com’ is short for ‘commercial’. Alternatives include .org (organisations) and .net (intended for Internet service providers). There are some domain registration addresses that have been made available more recently, such as .name (for individuals), .biz (for companies), .mobi (for mobile phones) and .asia for individuals and companies in Asia.

Domain registration isn’t at all expensive any more, but as millions of generic names are already taken, it can feel very difficult to come up with a suitable domain name for your website. Here are some domain registration comments:

• First of all, you may have difficulty finding single words and anything under four letters long. There are people monitoring these domains constantly and buying them the moment they become available. But, similar to panning for gold, valuable nuggets do appear from time to time. So keep on trying;
• The best thing to do is to come up with a series of two or three words or so that describes your website. You’ll need to think around this problem. If you’re registering a business website, you might want to include something in the domain name to distinguish it from other businesses with the same name – the town where you’re based, for example;
• If you want to get ranked high in search engines, it’s worth considering what your potential customers would be searching for when you’re registering your domain name;
• Try to avoid using hypens and numbers as domain names with these two features are generally worth less;

Once you’ve made a list of domain registration names you’re happy with, the next step is finding a registrar: godaddy.com, namecheap.com and registerfly.com are some of the cheapest out there right now. Really, anything over $10 per domain is now considered expensive. So, shop around.

When you type your chosen domain registration name (s) into a registrar’s search box, they will tell you whether or not each domain is available, and how much it would cost. Prepared to be surprised by some of the truly obscure names that are already taken, but don’t give up.

Finally, when you’re organising your domain registration, make sure to put in genuine contact details, to avoid any future potential legal and other problems.

Additional Reading:

Domaining

Technorati Tags: .com, domain, Domain Names, domain registration, domains, registrars, tld

Tags: .com, domain, Domain Names, domain registration, domains, registrars, tld