Web Hosting

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect search engine marketing and results?

Should you regist your domain for a long time? And if so, how long is good enough? If you want to be in the front of your competition, then you might think looking at the period of time your competitor companies have registered their domain. If your competitors have generally renewed their domain names for one or two years, you might consider registering your domain name for 5 or 10 years. While putting off your domain name’s expiration date might help your search engine rankings, keep in mind that this may be only a small victory when it comes to search engine technology.

Its good business sense to register a domain for at least 10 years. You don’t want to deal with the process   annual process of renewing them every year. It’s best to obtain the domain names that you want to keep for a while and renew then on a 5 to 10 year plan.

If your domain expires, there's a good opportunity that other will register your domain as soon as it expires. If, for whatever reason, you don’t renew your domain name, someone watching a ‘watch list’ of expiring domain names will try to capitalize on the online business that you’ve built over the years. They know that there is potential website traffic they can have simply by renewing your old domain name. By renewing your domain name for several years, your domain name won’t expire for a while, and it won’t be opened up to expired domain name buyers.

If you really want to stay ahead of the competition, you might consider registering or renewing your domain name for 100 years. Currently, Network Solutions (www.netsol.com) is the only registrar offering the 100 year option, which costs $999.00. GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com), currently offers to renew or register a domain name for 10 years, at a discount of $6.95 each year.

Yes, you can lose critical positioning in the search engines if you don't reregister your domain name in time. You may have to start the SEO process all over again!

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What’s the one one thing that your online business requires to stand above the competition and become very successful?

A great domain name!

The domain name is what people type in when they want to get to your site – it’s the part that comes after the http:// or the www. It’s your online address. Having something they can remember without having to look it up each time or keeping it in their bookmarks, to be lost among the all the other addresses, is the best thing you can do to get repeat visitors and word-of-mouth free traffic.

It’s said that all the good domain names have been taken, but that’s about as certainly not the case. Here are some simple guidelines that will make your domain name — and your business — a memorable and popular web destination.

1. Choose a Dot-Com

The primary rule is, go for the dot-com domain extension, which is typed as .com. This is the Main Street of the virtual real estate world, and the one that most people will type in regardless of what your domain extension actually is. While .org and .net were popular for a while, and then .us, .biz,.info and .name took the stage, people always come back to .com — irrespective of how many different country code top level domains are launched into the mainstream, like .cc, .ws, .to, .cn and others.

2. Choose something memorable

You want your business name to be your domain name too, if possible. So if your flower shop is called Felicty’s Flowers, you want to get felicitysflowers.com, assuming it’s available. If that domain name isn’t available, try adding a dash, like felicitys-flowers.com or a secondary descriptive word like felicitysflowersonline.com or prettyfelicitysflowers.com. If you’re creative, you’ll have no problem coming up with something that works with your business name and is memorable for your customer.

Bear in mind that if you use a dash in your domain name, which some Search Engine Optimization experts say attracts more free traffic to your site, you need to say the dashes if you use your domain name in an audio product or commercial; so it would be “felicitys dash flowers dot com”.

Most people who enter your domain name into their browser later will not type the dashes.

3. Get another variation

If you’re fortunate enough to grab a great domain name without the dashes, then you might want to get the same name with dashes between the words as well. You can put both of them up on your server as mirror sites to get the benefits of SEO as well as the ease of typing without the dashes.

You may also want to consider getting the .net or .org variation or even another extension or two to use as sister sites for your main dot com site… maybe you could put your forum on the .net, or use your .com for your main product and .net for your business background information site.

Even if you’re searching for a domain name that you don’t really think will be available, using your creativity and trying a variety of word combinations should allow you to lock down an unforgettable domain name that will attract people to your website.

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It can be quite time consuming checking domain name availability as you find each successive name you come up with has already been registered.

So why not buy an expired domain name? Don’t know where to look? You’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of domain names for sale at this site: http://www.crazydomainsales.com

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