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Domain
Name Selection and Registration
Most for-profit
businesses end their domain name with .com or .net.
Non-profit organizations generally use the .org ending.
Many more domain extensions such as .biz are now available
since the need for new addresses on the Web has exploded.
We will acquire
and set up the domain name of your choice with an appropriate
Web Hosting company or you can do it yourself. You will need to
pick a Web host, which need not be the same as your Internet Service
Provider, do a search on existing names, and register your unique
name.
It's important
that you get your own top-level domain name to make your Web site
look as professional as possible. The name should be short, simple
and easy to remember. Domain names are relatively inexpensive
these days, in the $25 range per year or less.
Do you want
to lock up your domain name across the board and register it on
several of the most popular extensions i.e. yourbiz.com, yourbiz.net,
yourbiz.biz, yourbiz.us ? Why would you want to do that?
Here's a true
example. A friend's young teen was doing a report for school.
Imagine his surprise (and his parents) when he typed in whitehouse.com
and got a very explicit porn site. Whitehouse.biz - again the
same porn site which rolled over to whitehouse.com. The "real"
White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.? It
can be found at whitehouse.org or whitehouse.net. Gives one pause
for thought, doesn't it?
It's a good
idea to acquire domain names with multiple variations of spelling
and punctuation i.e. petespizza.com, petepizza.com, petes_pizza.com,
petes-pizza.com, petes.pizza.com or even petespiza.com. You get
the picture.
Google recently
filed United States Patent Application 20050071741. As part of
that patent application, Google made apparent its efforts to wipe
out search engine spam, stating: "Valuable (legitimate) domains
are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate)
domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date
when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in
predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents
associated therewith."
Domains registered
for longer periods give the indication, true or not, that their
owner is legitimate. Google uses a domain's length of registration
when indexing and ranking a Web site for inclusion in their organic
search results.
So to prove
to everyone that your site is the real deal, register for more
than one year and increase your chances of boosting your search
ranking on Google.
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