Getting a domain for your web project

In Web Project Creation Process

Domain Research

To select a good domain name you need to keep a couple of things in mind.

Are you building a smaller type of website that is an SEO project and which is supposed to generate Adsense income or are you building a Blog that you want to take to the next level at some point in the future? Are you building a portal of some sort that should become an authority?

Why these questions? Well. For an SEO project, that is supposed to drive traffic to your website by ranking well in Google, the selection of a domain could be different than if you want to build out your brand. For a city portal your ideal name would be the actual city name which is hard to get these days. For a blog you may want to go for a brandable name that does not necessary include important keywords but is easy to remember. It depends.

Exact Match Generic Domain
Let’s assume that you have selected a niche where you want to target a specific *search phrase* that gets thousands of searches every month. Now ideally you would want to get a domain name that exactly reflects this search phrase, so that you domain name is considered the most relevant result as soon as you gain some traction. Here are some options you want to try:

As you see, you have several options you may look at. If you are building out some sort of authority website, you may also be concerned with the future value of the domain you are using.

Things to remember:
1. The most valuable domain does NOT contain any dashes
2. Com is currently better than any other extension. Second best is a local extension such as .us, .de etc.
3. For SEO projects the other TLDs or extensions should be just as good as you are not planning on building out brand value but simple want to rank well
4. COM, Net, Org, Biz can be target to a specific country acting like a .us or a .de etc

Having a generic exact match domain will be give you an edge when trying to rank for a keyword. Always try to find the NO DASH, Exact Match, .COM Domain for your niche. Chances are that most of such domains are taken already and if you really want it you may have to go and buy it on the secondary market.

Brandable Domains

If you have done your research, you have probably realized that most of the exact match .coms are registered and the asking price is probably way over your budget. So whats next? You may want to look out for a brandable domain that contains your keywords.

Even though you may not get the maximum benefits in search engines you could have a really easy to remember domain name that is relevant to your niche. For some projects you are probably much better off with a cool sounding name than with two keywords attached to each other. Examples of 100% brandable domains are Google.com, Yahoo.com and Amazon.com. The efforts you may spend in marketing such names will be significantly higher and you will not get easy search traffic coming to your site.

Domain name basics

If you are looking to get your domain name there are few things you need to know. You have the following options:
Handregistration vs. Buying Domain

Handregistration is the Domainers’ slang for actually going to a registrar such as namesilo.com, search for a domain name, and register it for the basic fee of around USD 10. This is usually a domain that no one has ever used or a domain name that has been used before, but for some reason has been *dropped* and is now available to the general public.

Most of the good domains however, are in possession of domain investors who register the best domains and provide them for sale on secondary markets such as Sedo.com or GoDaddy Auctions. The price tag here can be somewhere between USD 100 to USD 8000000.

If you are very serious about a project then you may want to actually buy such a premium domain name. Remember the domain name is the foundation you are building your website on. A good domain name can give you an edge over competitors.
Domain Tools
In order to start looking for domains, you need to have your list of relevant keywords with you. You may also want to have the Google Keywords Tool open in order to check for popular search terms while looking for what is available. One tool that you may use for your initial search is Domize.com. It is a handy tool to quickly checks if the major extensions have been taken already. You can make such searches also with many other tools provided by your hosting service such as Bluehost or GoDaddy.

If you are considering buying a domain name you may want to use the Sedo.com search function to see for how much current domains of your liking are currently selling for. There are many tools out there that can help you searching for available names, even bulk searches.

Should you be interested in a brandable domain you may want to take a look at the tool Wordoid.com that allows you to creatively create domains based on your keyword. It is definitely cool to try.

Domain Registration
Let’s assume you have found a domain name and you wonder what the next steps would be in terms of hosting.

First Domain with Hosting
Is your domain of choice available for hand registration you may want to simply register it via a shared hosting service like Bluehost.com and use this domain to open an account. All hosting companies make it possible for you to make a registration through them.

Domain Registrars

Should you already have a hosting account with a service like Bluehost, then you have two options: You either register the domain through Bluehost and pay a high fee or you use a discount registrar such as namesilo.com. Whereas most hosting companies charge you for WHOIS secrecy for example and where a domain registration will cost you US 12, a service like namesilo.com will do a registration for you at a cost of USD 8 and will provide you with WHOIS secrecy for free. Should you be buying lots of domain names, this might save you hundreds of dollars. If you decide to register your domain via a registrar like namesilo.com you can then simply point two bits of information to your hosting service and use the domain in the same fashion without any disadvantages.

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