Domain Names

Domain Names can affect whether someone clicks on your site or not. A meaningful domain name is the best asset you can have. You can take it with you, even when you change hosts. Once registered, you need to renew it each year. Don't leave it until the last minute, as a well-known, high-ranking domain name will always be in demand.

A domain name can contribute to your online identity. Getting a good reputation and keeping it, is important.

Many search engines will not include sites with question marks (as with sites provided by most affinity programs), or multiple sites per domain name, as with free hosts. Eg mydogsite.tripod.com

The domain name you promote on search engines also often affects whether somebody chooses your site. Given a choice of several sites, they will prefer a meaningful domain name obviously related to the topic.

Having multiple domain names can be beneficial if advertising through Google Adwords, again because a relevant domain name will convince people your site is relevant. You may have a main domain name related to your business name, eg FredFlintstone.com, but having additional domain names redirected to the main domain name, eg StoneAgeFamilies.com.

Using your keywords in your domain name may help your ranking a little at some search engines, although it is probably more important to have an easily remembered domain name.

Consider whether or not to use dashes in your domain name. It can get annoying having to spell out the dashes in your domain name eg freemarketinghelp vs free-marketing-help. It no longer seems to give an advantage in search engine positioning.

You can purchase and register your own domain name extremely cheaply at these sites. GoDaddy also has a name suggestion tool. Most of my domains have been purchased from GoDaddy.


GoDaddy
SimpleURL
Dotster
.COM is the most professional ending for your domain name. Although you may wish to purchase additional domain names with other suffices, eg .NET, .ORG, to prevent others from taking advantage of your goodwill.

You may wish to buy additional domain names in your country. For example to get included in the Australian Google index, you generally have to either be hosted in Australia, or to have a .com.au domain name.

In return for showing a popup about the country Tokelau, you can get a free meaningful domain name ending in .TK. But you must send traffic to it. Free .TK domain names resolve to a frame, which prevents you from accessing individual pages directly, which is bad for link exchanges. But if you are happy just promoting your index page, then go for it.
Dot.TK