This is one of the very first step to creating your own website – is to register for a domain name. This step should not be taken lightly. Throughout this post we’ll be exploring different aspects of registering a domain name, what is needed and why.

Every website on the internet is accompanied by a domain name whether it is the main root domain name or any sub-domain name. Think of it as a permanent URL address that points to your website. Don’t confuse a domain name and a hosting server. Both are needed to display your website. A domain name is a registry provided by the registrar that belongs to you during the contracted amount of time. A hosting server hosts the actual files of your site such as your web pages, images…etc. Without either one, your website will not display. A good analogy of this is to think of a house with a physical address. The address guides you to the location but without the house, you will not see anything but a piece of land. The other way around is true, if you have a house built and no address, no one would be able to find you including the mailman. Thus the domain name and hosting server must co-exist. I will cover more on hosting servers in another post. For now let’s concentrate on the domain name.

Before you jump into registering a domain name here are some tips to remember.

• Keep your domain name short.
• Pick an easy to remember domain name
• *Choose a domain name with keywords related to your product or service.
• If combining words are hard to read, separate them with hyphens.

*There are exceptions to this tip, read below content for explanation.

Let’s pretend we have a company that provides web design services and the name of the company is Creative Styling.

What would be the best domain name for this situation? Well this is where you ask yourself if the purpose of your website is to simply provide a service which in turns make money or you want the website itself to make the money. What do I mean by that you ask? The first type contains no advertisement or any affiliate companies on your website and you are relying solely on customers contacting you to provide a service for them. The second type contains advertisement and affiliate companies where if visitors clicks on one of your affiliate promotions and buys a product, you would get a commission.

For this example let’s go over the first type and we’ll take a look at the second type after. In the first type, it would be more appropriate to use your company name as the domain name. Looking at the tips above, this would be an exception. It would then be easy to figure out that I would want www.creativestyling.com as the domain name. Now read that to yourself to see if it is awkward to read. If so, then you can always add a hyphen between the two words like so www.creative-styling.com. This domain name is not too long and it is easy to remember. However keep in mind that not every companies’ name is this simple and would need further thinking.

Now let’s indulge another type of website. Let’s pretend we have a company that relies on high traffic visitors to come through our site and we rely on the advertisements and affiliate programs to gain our revenue. Let’s say we have a company that offers insights and tips on physical fitness and the company name is Maximum Strength. For this type of website, you’ve already established that you want to make money through the site with ads and affiliate programs. So you want to think of a name with relative keyword. In this case you would not want to use your company’s name as the domain name rather you would use a domain name like fitness.com, physique.com, health-fitness.com, or body-fitness.com. These are keyword targeted domain names.

NOTE: Although keyword targeted domain names have some weight, it is not all you need for search engines to rank you higher. There are numerous other factors that contributes to how your website will rank.

Now that we’ve establish what type of domain names we want, let’s continue to register the domain name.

We’ve chosen to use body-fitness.com. That’s great but how do we know if it is available to use? There are many free-tools on the web that can check this for you. Most domain name registries have this tool on their site for you to check what’s available. Lets say we use Name.com. This site is one of many domain name registry sites that you can use to purchase your domain names from.

The next thing you do is you type in the domain name you wanted and submit. It should come back to you whether the domain name is available or not and let you purchase it there if it’s available. Don’t be discourage if it is not available as many great domain names are already taken by others so just be patient and try different combination of words.

Here are some more tips:

• If the domain name you want is already taken, try adding a word before or after the main keyword.
• When possible, try purchasing the major suffixes like .com, .net, .org with the same keyword. This prevents other companies from buying them and having the same domain name as you.

Sometimes a domain name is taken but it is just parked. Parked, means someone has registered the name but have not pointed it to any hosting services yet. In those cases, you can find out who currently owns that domain name and if you want it bad enough, you can always bid on that name by contacting the owner and hopefully they will let it go for a fair amount.

That’s all there is to it. I hope this article has shed some light to how domain names are registered. In a future article, I will go over how to purchase a hosting server and how to point your newly bought domain name to your server.

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