Buying a Domain name

Domains

After you have decided on a subject to build a website about (your niche) the first thing you need to do is buy a domain name. Actually 'buy' is the wrong word - you only take ownership of the domain name on a yearly basis. You can 'buy' as many years up front as you like, but after that period is up you have to renew in order to keep the domain.

There are lots of domain registration companies and competition has forced the price right down. Expect to pay no more than $10 per year for a domain - and maybe even a few dollars less than that.

There are many ideas about what constitutes a 'good' domain. Internet marketers tend to focus on the kind of domain names that the search engines like and there is endless speculation about what that might be!

In general, here are some principles that appear to be sound:

• .com domains are better than anything else. If your ideal domain is not available as a .com, don't be tempted to buy one of the other suffixes - apart, at a pinch, from .org which may be okay if you are making an authority site.
• Always get a domain that contains your primary keyword and ideally your keyword phrase. For example, if your niche is 'diabetes' do your keyword research to find the most-searched for phrases that contain the base word 'diabetes' and try to find a domain that reflects one of them.
• Shorter is better. One-word domains a re very hard to find, but you can often find good 2 or 3-word ones. It is rarely a good idea to buy domains with more that 3 words unless they are very short!
• Hyphens are currently out. It seems that the search engines used to like hypens in domains to separate the words, but now opinion says that they like all the words to be run together.
• Watch out for unexpected words. If your keyword is, for example, 'cats' and you are able to find a domain that pairs it with 'expert', you may get search engine traffic that you hadn't bargained for as the robots parse your domain and find words that you hadn't intended.
• Initially, buy your domain for a minimum of 2 years. Search engines supposedly consider 1-year registrations as a sign of potential junk sites and may sideline your domain until they see you've renewed it.

Your domain is important - don't be afraid to take time over its selection. Also, as domains are so cheap, if you find several that you like, don't be afraid to register them all. They can be a great investment because if you do turn out to have found a profitable niche, it is really useful to have other related domains that you can build supplemental and satellite sites on.

I'd like to give you a list of all the different companies that I've used to register domains, but the truth is that in all my time online I've only used three. Two of those I have less than five domains between them. Pretty much all my domains are registered with GoDaddy because I've always found them to be efficient and highly trustworthy. Their prices are very competitive too!

http://www.GoDaddy.com