Picking Your Domain Name
Once you’ve made your decision about web hosting, whether it’s free or paid, before you sign up you need to think about choosing the right domain name.
Now there’s two ways you can go about this, the first will depend on what type of hosting you have and what you plan to do with it.
If you’ve chosen the paid hosting option and plan on making more than one site or blog, or want subdomains you’re going to want to pick a more generic domain name. I’m sure there’s now plenty of you scratching your heads and wondering why this is so, when you keep hearing about how you need good keywords in your titles and urls etc. Well let me explain.
If you plan on setting up multiple sites on the one domain (or several subdomains) having a keyword related domain name may seem a bit weird down the track.
For example
You’ll see this site is work-at-home-mum.vjad.net - the vjad.net being the actual domain name. What this means is that I also can have a site at work-from-home.vjad.net, affiliate-track.vjad.net and world-of-dogs.vjad.net and they make sense but if I chose a domain like - golf.com then those subdomains suddenly look a bit strange eg world-of-dogs.golf.com. By the same token you could also choose a broad keyword as a domain name if you know you’re going to make more related sites (micro-niches) eg - a domain of http://classic-action-figures.com can then also have subdomains of http://star-wars.classic-action-figures.com and http://transformers.classic-action-figures.com etc without looking silly.
That’s if you want to go the sub-domain route. If instead you’re planning on only one site, have free hosting so you’re a bit more limited in what you can do, or plan on purchasing a new domain for each new site/blog you create, then you’ll want to have a domain name that is keyword related.
I’ll go into more detail in finding the best keywords in later posts, but for now you could go somewhere like Google Adwords Keywords Tool and see what comes up.
Remember too that if you chose free hosting then the hosting companies name will probably be in the url - eg workfromhome.freehostia.com and that when you sign up, whatever name you choose as your username will probably be your url - so think carefully before hitting the submit button.
If you’re going for paid hosting - many hosting providers, such as Hostgator will also allow you to purchase a domain name or you can go to such sites as GoDaddy and Netfirms etc (both of which I have used in the past) or you could hit the domain auction etc site and see if there is a related domain name for sale.
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May 29th, 2009 at 5:42 am
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