The Registration of domain names is a thriving business on the Internet today this is evident by the high bids that companies are willing to pay in Per-Per-Click (PPC) engines to attract potential customers for domain name registration.
The business of domain name registration is sometimes referred to as Internet Real Estate. Just like we can occupy high traffic areas in the central business districts of major cities in the real world, we can register domains for commonly used words or sought after keywords to generate traffic more easily to our websites. While most common words and abbreviations have already been taken for the most widely used top level domain names, with a little bit of creativity we can still register an endless number of promising domain names.
While there is no clear indication to what extent .com, .net as well as country top level domain names such as .co.uk, .de, .fr and so forth influence search engine rankings of websites, the word is that .org domains are still favored by Google as part of the non-commercial tradition.
However, this article is not looking at how the domain extension influences the ranking of a website as this is thought to be insignificant for search engine rankings. A stronger influence on search engine rankings have indeed the length of registration, frequency of DNS changes as well as the reputation of the registrar.
Even though sometimes overrated in its importance - especially in relationship to its effect on search engine rankings, domain names do remain an important asset for the online corporate identity of your business.
The main consideration concerning your domain name will be to choose between a creative name (such as yahoo, alibaba, kazaa) or a keyword name (such as study-tourism, retail-gifts or hawaii-mortgage-company. In fact using main keywords in your domain name does have a positive effect on your search engine rankings, especially to get your rankings off the ground after launching a new website. Down the road the effect however becomes almost negligible.
While many people tend to register numerous domain names to accommodate most important key words within them, they overlook that Google and other major search engines will pay almost the same attention to sub-domains. So instead of registering hawaii-real-estate, florida-real-estate and so forth, we might as well just register real-estate and have sub domains such as hawaii.real-estate, florida.real-estate and so forth.
What people further underestimate is that search engines in general look for keywords in the URL (unique resource locator) which comprises of the top level domain, any potential sub-domains and of course the file name. So, if you happen to be using a creative domain name that does not contain any important key words, you can of course include your main keywords in the file name of the webpage itself, i.e. florida-real-estate.html.
Hence, in a nutshell, while domain names are a major asset for your corporate identity, their significance for search engine rankings is overrated, as there are various ways to accommodate significant keywords in the URL and eventually other onsite factors (coding techniques, content) of a website will have a greater impact for search engine rankings.
Svend Nelson is a university lecturer and Internet entrepreneur. He is an online marketing specialist active in various online industries; among his online presences in the real estate and home loan industry are and . Svend also just started a blog sharing his experience about how to make money online. Svend lived and worked in various countries across Latin America, Europe and Asia before settling in Thailand.
Whether it is for business, pleasure or just something to do, everyone seems to be building themselves web sites these days. Its getting ever easier to do and there is a growing list of practical purposes for all of them. To make things better there are hundreds of places to buy cheap domain names these days so your site can look that much more professional.
While it was once more cost effective to build a site off of another domain name something like www.freehosting.com/yourname --it never looked that good. For a personal site no one cared, but for a business or organization it took a lot away from its credibility and style. From the very beginning of the world wide web a non independent domain has reeked of tackiness. At the present, such things are only really acceptable when used for personal or not for profit web sites.
The fact that cheap domains are now so easily attained there is no excuse left in avoiding it. If you are already doing business online then the sleeker look is a must. Person after person will tell you that they trust a business more when it is set up online by itself. To a potential customer a domain name speaks in the same professional manner as a 1 800 number. Going the other route suggests the same level of professionalism as a cheap storefront sign. This tells us that by taking advantage of a cheap domain name as opposed to a free tacked on name communicates that the business is that much more committed to itself.
Further more, as any marketer will tell you, name recognition is an important key to winning over clients. Once they are able to remember the businesss name they should be able to do nothing more then type it into their browser and add .com to find out more about it. Passing on a cheap domain name and using the secondary name alternative means your potential clients have that much more to remember; and marketing experts tell us plainly that they wont remember.
Personal websites dont need this. For people looking to share family photos, journals, literature or art there are thousands of web communities that offer to host. In most instances there isnt a lot of reason to go any other way. Still the temptation is there. Frankly, if youre having fun doing it and you want a personal site that looks that much cooler then take advantage of all that cheap domain registration out there.
The perk in going that route for a personal site is that advertising and name recognition isnt a big concern. Most people shopping for cheap domain names for these kind of private sites only want the name to be cute and appealing to friends and family. The .com isnt as important here. This makes cheap domains cost even less money because the .net, .us, and other extensions arent as sought after.
So maybe its time to get rid of that extra long web name you picked up for free. Try this out and be a master of your own domain.
Christopher M. Luck has an extensive background in dealing exclusively with cheap domains online and is now offering his free to the public. If you are at all interested in Christophers personal domain advice, tips, or secrets, you can visit his