Domain Names

How to Choose a Good Domain Name?

Tips for Choosing a Domain Name that Works

Choosing a domain name can be as important to your company as choosing the company name. In fact, in several cases, companies have changed their name to their website domain because people recognized it more readily than the company name. So finding a domain name can be very important. These tips should help you choose wisely.

Branding and Your Domain Name

. Whether you are trying to sell paper clips or web design services, your website domain name will affect your brand. As I said above, some companies have even changed their company name to their website domain name. So, when you're choosing a domain name it should be something that you could live with if it were your company name.

In fact, the best domains are your company name

. Your current customers know your company name and they're comfortable with it. Some of your customers may have already typed in your name with .com at the end to see if that's your website. So if you can get a domain name that is your company name, you might have the perfect domain.

To do: Check to see if your company name is already taken

. Go to your Web browser and type http://www.YourCompanyName.com into the URL box. If the result is a competitor or something you wouldn't want to be associated with, you can try to buy the domain or you might want to consider changing your company name.

How Long Should Your Domain Name Be?

It depends upon your domain name registrar, but in general domain names can be anywhere from 26 to 67 characters long. But just because you can, doesn't mean that you should have a domain name that is over 30 or 40 characters long. Remember:

• Your customers need to type your domain in.
• Even if they're clicking a link, that link needs to be typed in by someone.
• Longer domains are often harder to remember.
• Recommend sticking with domain names that are no longer than 20 characters or so.

To do: How long is your company name? Is it more than 20 characters including spaces? What about not including spaces?

Special Characters in Domain Names There aren't a lot of special characters allowed in domain names. For the most part you can use alphabetic and numeral characters as well as hyphen (-). Some domain registrars may allow other characters, but those are the most common ones allowed.

Web Site Plan

Make a Plan Before you Begin. Your site plan should include:

1. The Site Purpose: What is the point of this website? And how is it going to fulfill that purpose better than any other site on the Web?
2. The Site Goals: SMART GOALS can help you take a mediocre site and make it great. Once you know the goals of the site, you can plan around them.
3. The Customers: Who is going to read this website? Try to be as specific as you can regarding your target audience. Include details like: age, hobbies, income, job title(s), and so on. You might envision different people coming to different parts of your site - that's fine. But know who the audience is that you want to attract. And if your site is already live, you should include data on the audience that you currently have.
4. The Content: What will be on the site? Will the content change regularly? Will you focus on selling products with product pages or focus on providing information through articles? Is your content going to be mostly text or images or multimedia? Do you have the content already created or do you still need to get it?
5. The Design: What colors will your site be? Remember that design aesthetic varies across different demographics. So if you're planning a website for cutting edge designers, it will have a different look than one designed for non designers. The design includes things like graphic elements, colors, fonts, and typography. The more you plan ahead of time, the easier the design phase will be.
6. The Timeline: Once you have the rest of the pieces of the plan together, you should decide on a schedule. Don't forget to include time for testing, revision, and user feedback.

  Write Down Your Plan: When you start planning a project, it can get very messy very quickly, so if you plan on having lots of ways to capture your ideas you'll be in better shape and write your ideas.

White Hat versus Black Hat

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

White Hat SEO is merely effective marketing, making efforts to deliver quality content to an audience that has requested the quality content. Traditional marketing means have allowed this through transparency and exposure. A search engine's algorithm takes this into account, such as Google's PageRank.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Building a Web Site

If you want to have a business online, you need to build a website.  A website helps to promote your products, as well as, identifies you on the Internet.
Things to know before you start to build your own website:
    * You don't have to be a webmaster.
    * You don't need to be experience in any of the programming languages.
    * You can have your own website up in a matter of a couple of hours from now!
There a great chance to earn money from your site, in the most efficient way possible.
There are plenty of such resources on the Net, but how to build a successful content-based Web site - one that downloads fast, is easy to use, ranks well with the search engines and pulls in lots of traffic.

However to get started you just need whats listed steps below:
Step 1 - Domain Name: How to Choose a Good Domain Name - Domain Names for Your Website with your main keyword in it: Choosing a domain name can be a big step for your business. more..


Step 2 - Hosting: Hosting is where you put your website and all the Web pages.There are several types of Web hosting options you can choose from. more..


Step 3 - Plan Your Website: Plan Your Business Site Before You Start Building.
A site plan will help you create a business website that meets your needs and the needs of your customers. By taking the time at the beginning to draft a plan, you can avoid pitfalls and make sure you have the content needed to get your site off the ground.

Step 4 - Build Your Website Page by Page: Building a website requires that you work on one page at a time. To build your site you should be familiar with:

• Design Basics - The elements of good design and how to use it on websites.
• Basic HTML - HTML is the building block of a Web page. While it's not absolutely required, you'll do better if you learn HTML than if you don't.
• Learning CSS - CSS is the building block of how pages look. And learning CSS will make it easier for you to change your site's look when you need to, it's easy to learn.
• Web Page Editors - Finding the perfect editor for your needs will help you learn design, HTML, and CSS.

Step 5 - Publish Your Website: Publishing your website is a matter of getting the pages you created in step 4 up to the hosting provider you set up in step 1. You can do this with either the tools that come with your hosting service or with FTP clients. Knowing which you can use depends upon your hosting provider. Contact them if you are not sure.

Step 6 - Promote Your Website: The easiest way to promote your website is through search engine optimization or SEO. You build your Web content so that it ranks well in search engines. This can be very difficult, but it is inexpensive and can make a good results if you work at it.
Other ways to promote your site include: word of mouth, email, and advertising. You should include your URL on all professional correspondence and whenever it makes sense in personal messages. You can put your URL in your email signature along with your email address.

Step 7 - Maintain Your Website: Maintenance can be the most boring part of website design, but in order to keep your site going well and looking good, you need to do it. Testing your site as you're building it and then after it's been live for a while is important. And you should also work on content development on a regular basis.

SEO and Traffic

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing your pages to make them ‘crawler’ friendly, so that they can be read and understood easier by search engines. It is also the process of making web pages relevant to specific keywords in order to get your website to the top of search rankings.

The heart of SEO are keywords

In the world of AdSense SEO is essential. If SEO is not done at all or done incorrectly it could seriously damage the sucess of your AdSense project. The heart of SEO are keywords. SEO is mainly about the types of keywords you use, their placement and their density on your website pages. SEO basically represents the foundation of your marketing machine. It determines what kind traffic you get and it determines the quality of that traffic. It even determines, in a roundabout way, your final traffic levels.