Choosing a Domain Name and Registering it

One of the most important parts of your online presence is your domain name.  Often small business owners choose domain names that have keywords in them because they think they will gain a better position in the search engines.  What they should be concentrating on is creating a name that a brand can be built around. 

Here are some guidelines about choosing a name and registering it.

Selecting a name

The first thing you need to consider is what to include in your name:

• Do you need hyphens?
• Should you use your entire company name, or just part of it?
• Including keywords?

Consider your visitors first

Are they going to be able to remember your domain?

Try to find a domain that is easy to remember and not confusing, such as containing words that end with the same letter the next word begins with.

Try not to use hyphens as people forget to type them.

Shorter domain names are easier to remember.  If you can pick a one word domain name even better.

Consider the Search Engines

Once upon a time, exact match domain names were important.  These were domains that matched a search term.  But because of spamming tactics such as keyword stuffing in domain names Google isn't placing as much importance on these.

Registering the domain

Use a reputable management company to register domains on your behalf or register it yourself using one of the many registration companies such as www.icuk.net or www.123-reg.co.uk

If you use a third party such as your website designer to register your domain, ensure the domain is your property and not held in your website designers name. 

When we register domains for our clients the domains are the property of our client, giving them full control, we simply manage them on their behalf.

Beware some companies register domains in their name and then charge you a monthly fee for the use of that domain.  Make sure you own your domain.

Setting up the email

Once you have registered your domain you can use it for email and point the domain at your website.

You should be able to set up email accounts, forwarding accounts and web forwarding although some of these features may cost a little extra.

Forwarding email is the most common setup which allows email addresses to be forwarded to other accounts such as to a Hotmail or Googlemail accounts.

Actual email accounts are boxes where emails are stored until you retrieve them using an email client such as Outlook or webmail services if available.

Catchall accounts can be set up to send all emails no matter what the address @yourdomain.co.uk to be forwarded to another account, or the catchall can be set to delete or bounce emails.  We prefer to delete catchall accounts as this reduces spam.

Setting up the website

Pointing your domain at a website can be done using two methods:

• Frames show your actual domain inside a frame, this keeps your domain name visible in the address bar of your visitor's browser.
• Jumping to your website is like having your domain retype your actual web address in the browser address bar. 

Both methods are good if you use free ISP web space, but not so good for the search engines listing your site.