So you’re looking for a domain name? Maybe you have an online business you want to start up, or perhaps you already have a business but want to give yourself and online presence? You might not want to do any business, but would rather have a place where family and friends can go and keep in touch or see what’s going on in your daily life. No matter what your goals are, if you’re looking to make any kind of online presence, you are going to want to look into registering a domain name.

The first thing you need to do, before anything else, is decide what name you are getting, and what extension (.com, .net, .org, .us, etc…) you want. I will talk about finding a good name first as it’s usually the hardest part. When choosing a name, you are not just picking any random term or phrase. You need to ask yourself a few questions first such as:

What is my goal for this domain name? Am I selling anything? Is this based on an existing business? Do I want to make a business out of this domain name?

Questions like this are important because it helps you narrow down a purpose for the domain name. What does that matter you ask? Well, if you are selling cars you might want to look for a name like cars.com. This is what’s referred to a generic term or keyword. We’ll focus on keywords later on, for now, I just want you to think about how people should find you, remember you, and know you in the future. Cyberspace is a very large place so you want to make sure your customers,friends or family can find you easily, and remember what the name is so they can visit again whenever they like.

Now, I mentioned that cars.com is generic. This is because it’s not the name of a brand, or company, or logo. For example, cars is a generic term but Ford is not. Pen is a generic term, but Bic is not. I think you get the picture. These terms can make a difference because if you register a domain that is a non generic term, then it’s possible someone owns that trademark. I can tell you right now, you want to steer clear of trademarks when it comes to registering a domain name (unless you own that trademark of course). Registering someone else’s trademark can potentially get you into serious trouble. If you want to check on trademarks prior to registering a domain name, you can check out Legal Zoom. They have a nice system to search for trademarks and register your own if interested.

Another reason generic terms are great domain names is because they get high amounts of  web traffic. Unlike highway traffic, web traffic is good and the more your website gets, the more potential you have to reach more people, sell more items, or educate more people on your topics. It’s worth mentioning that many people make a very good living purely buying and selling domain names. Generic terms have gone for over a million dollars before for a single sale. I would highly advise buying a generic domain name from someone if you don’t have a very strong understanding of domain names and exactly what type of goals you have, accompanied by a strong business plan to achieve those goals. So this bears the question, where do you register a domain name?

Registrars are companies that have the right to sell you a domain name. ICANN has a list of accredited registrars. Make sure you are buying from one of these companies. What you want to do is go to one of their websites, or call their customer service and tell them you are interested in a domain name. However, there is still one more part of a domain name that has not been decided.

By now you should have a few domain names that you would like to possibly register. But what we haven’t discussed is the extension. Many people feel that a .com is the only way to go. However, keep in mind that while “yourdomainname.com” might not be available, “yourdomainname.net” might be available for registration. This means anyone in the world can register the domain name. If a domain is already registered, then a registrar cannot sell it to you. Someone else has the rights to that name already. If you want to see if some names are available, you can usually go to any registrar’s website and perform what’s called a “WHOIS” search.

The WHOIS directory is a database that contains every registered domain name and some basic information about each one such as the registration date, the expiration date, contact info, etc. Try not to get overwhelmed just yet. Remember, we’re only talking about 1) finding a domain name you like and 2) picking an extension.

Ok, back to the extensions. When the rules for domain names were being created, the powers that be decided to have extensions represent different types of websites. COM was for commercial purposes, NET was for networks, ORG was for non-profit organizations and the list goes on. There are quite a few domain name extensions or TLD’s (Top Level Domains) one can purchase. Rather than try to sort through a complete list of them, it’s better to view the ones your registrar sells as they will always have the most popular TLD’s available. The top TLD’s are (in no particular order):

.com, .net, .org, .us, .info, .biz, .co.uk, .eu

While the guidelines were put in place to prevent confusion amongst web surfers, there has been no actual regulation of who can buy which TLD. With the exception of country specific TLD’s (.us, .co.uk, etc) anyone can register any TLD for any reason and put up any type of website they deem fit. Most people will try to register the .com first, and if that’s not taken, they either choose another domain name, or see if the same one is available in a different TLD. It all depends on how attached you are to the name, or how much sense it makes, if you spent money marketing that name already and a number of other factors.

Buying a domain name is not the same adventure for every person out there. It boils down to the purpose of the domain name which really makes all the difference in the world when buying the domain. If you want pure search engine traffic, then you might want a generic term, if you want to promote your business, then you may want only your business name.

The last piece of general advice I can give is that if you’re buying a domain for a business, or will be selling things on the website then you should consider securing your brand or online identity. This means registering multiple TLD’s with the same domain. For example, you might want to register yourdomainname.com, yourdomainname.net, yourdomainname.org as a minimum. There are a few reasons for this. For starters, you prevent anyone else from purchasing those domains so long as you own them. So if you are promoting your company, you don’t want someone else registering the .net TLD and stealing your traffic or confusing your customers. Many people don’t believe that this happens, but it happens all the time. Is it legal? Well, that depends on the situation and is up to the courts to decide, however, legal or not, it can be damaging to your company if it happens to you. And depending on the outcome of a court battle, the owner might only sell for an incredibly high price.

I was going through some posts in one of the very popular forums recently and saw to my surprise that some guy said he got ranked on the 5th position out of about 13 million results in google less than 5 hours after he got indexed. That, of course got me wondering. I took a look at the keyword he targeted and knew immediately that the keyword would never earn him a dime. Why, because he was targeting keywords no one was looking for.

These days, you will find that there are many people who will tell you that they can easily get indexed and ranked favorably high within 24 hours. I am not saying it is not possible. But the majority of the tactics are complete blackhat. So, how do you choose the right keywords for your website?

This takes a lot of thinking because sometimes what we think people should be searching for comes out as completely different from what they are really searching for. In the hey days, to was such a very heavy task to try and put yourself in shoes of your potential client or website visitor and think like they would. Of course this never works most of time because we really don’t know what is going on in their heads. But thankfully, there are lots of keyword tools online that you can use to brainstorm.

To rank higher, you would have to start using keywords that may not have huge volumes but are extremely targeted. These are often referred to as long tail keywords. If you are starting out, these are the keywords to target unless you stumble on a market that has not even been tapped at all. Use the keyword tools to determine what keywords to use. The keywords you are looking for are mostly 3-5 word phrases. Once you dominate these keywords, you will be able to rank very high in the search engines

In the infinite environment of internet, if we particularly talk about the business, we see that whenever the big industries increase their popularity so side by side small business also try to get noticed in the eyes of users. It is the condition where we can say that SEO can help as we know that it optimizes the website. There are many things that are involved in making the website according to the SEO. But if you have no idea about SEO so there are some important points that can guide you to work out.
Web Analysis:

Analysis of everything in any filed is always been very important aspect for business whether it is a small shop or entire organization. So for the websites, it should be gone through this phase as well. Google analytics can be very helpful for this task to be performed. This technique helps you to find out how many visitors’ visits your website, how long they stayed and what keywords and information they searched from your website. These all analysis would help you to rationalize you SEO and tell you clearly about the most used keywords on your site which can increase profit of your website even if less people are familiar with your website as well.
How familiar and prominent your keywords are: the website that we own must be relevant and according to what we are specialize in. this is the best option you get for enhancing your popularity among good business website. Because if the keywords and data that you are using in your website is more specific with your subject of discussion, then there are more chances of increase in visitors. The keywords should be clear and prominent. There are number of keywords analyzers available on the internet. They can help you out about the publicity of their regular search.

Relevant page titles:

The titles of the all web pages should be reference able to the content your website contains. Whenever your web pages get opened in google or msn or yahoo searched so the main titles and blue underlined text would be focused of your website. So it should be relevant, accessed by keywords and designed in such a format that it gets best ranks when searched by any search engine.

Proper sequenced and best links:

Search engines usually searches the web page by the links it is offering on web page of the same content and also by the professionalism and quality they are providing. So the best idea that can figure out this task is the use and registering the websites in directories as much as you can. This will help other links to be attached with your website but quality should be first priority for yourself at any cost.
Add you working details:

The detail about your particular work on which your website is based is very appropriate option for users to get access to you. The name, phone numbers, addresses of your organization or other must be a part of your website. So people would not think that you do not exist on the face of this world.

There are now more private health insurance schemes than ever before; some of these are online, like Health On Line UK . The rise in the number of these companies is largely due to the problems and cutbacks in Britain’s National Health Service. A variety of services may provide you with greater choice, but it also presents you with the problem of assessing which scheme is the best one for you.

Many people only have a limited amount of money to spend on private health insurance, Health On Line is a good choice for them because they can choose what they are covered for. Not only does this mean that clients can choose the content they are covered for, it also mean that they’re saving money in not paying for options they don’t need. When client opt for online health insurance like this, they also have the option of speaking to someone over the telephone. Clients can start with just the basic components of healthcare and add more options at a future date, if that is what they want. The step by step quotation process that health on line offers makes it possible to view the cost of different health cover options and change anything that doesn’t suit.

The cover that health on line offers the public is underwritten by insurance companies such as AXA and PPP, and the company’s finances are regulated by the FSA. The way in which these services are underwritten means that clients will benefit from an accumulated 65 years experience of healthcare. Health on line promises access to more than 200 hospitals, including a variety of private hospitals. The health on line website is easy to access and the navigation bar has links to all aspects of private health care, including users’ frequently asked questions. Health on line is an easy way for clients to find the healthcare they want at a price they can afford.

  You know exactly what your organisation does and what your website offers its users. This information has probably become second nature to you, but first-time visitors to your site won’t know this. As such, make sure you don’t forget to tell them what you do.

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won’t even know what you’re so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways:

Page title

Don’t just use the page title to tell me who you are; tell me what you do too. If your company is called Bloggs Ltd don’t only place the words, ‘Bloggs Ltd’ in the page title as there’s plenty of room for more information. If Bloggs Ltd sells widgets, a good page title might be: ‘Bloggs Ltd – Buy widgets online’.

Note in this example, ‘Buy widgets online’ was used to describe what Bloggs Ltd does, and not ‘Widget seller’. When describing what it is you do be sure to speak the language of your users, and don’t talk from your point of view. From your point of view you sell widgets, but from their point of view they want to buy widgets online, so do bear this in mind when authoring the page title.

The page title is the first thing that appears on screen, and especially on dial-up modems can be the only thing that displays for the first 10 seconds or so. For many web users this is the first piece of content they’ll read on your site.

The page title is also very important for search engines, which place more importance on the page title than any other on-page element. Descriptive page titles are also essential for blind web users utilising screen readers, as it’s the first thing that gets read aloud to them upon arriving at the page.

Tagline

A good tagline is one of the most important usability features on any website. A good tagline should be explanatory and not vague, clear and informative and about four to eight words in length. A tagline is different to a company slogan, in that the former describes what the organisation/website does whereas the latter is designed to evoke certain feeling or create a brand.

‘Priceless’ and ‘I’m loving it’ are slogans by Mastercard and McDonald’s respectively – they differ from taglines because they don’t describe what the organisation does.

Taglines are so important because no matter on what page site visitors enter your website, they’ll always be able to quickly gain an understanding of what your organisation and website offers. This can be especially true for site visitors coming into internal pages from search engines – by telling these site visitors what you do through the tagline, they may be more likely to explore your site beyond the initial page on which they enter.

Taglines are also good for search engine optimisation, as they appear on every page right at the top of the page, an area on to which search engines place importance.

Main heading

The main heading on the homepage is one of the first pieces of text web users notice, especially on clean well laid out websites. Sticking a ‘Welcome to our website’ may seem to be friendly and welcoming to you, but to task-driven site visitors it doesn’t help in any way shape or form. A quick summary of what you do and/or what the website offers, in just four or five words can be highly effective (and very search engine friendly too!).

Opening paragraph

Perhaps the most important place on the homepage to tell your site visitors what you do, the opening paragraph must be short, succinct and straight-to-the-point. Just one sentence is enough to put across this most basic yet fundamental of information.

When writing this opening paragraph, remember to front-load the content (this rule actually applies to every paragraph on the website). Front-loading means putting the conclusion first, followed by the when, what, where and how.

Don’t write a story with a start, middle and conclusion – generally speaking on the web, we scan looking for the information that we’re after so put the conclusion first. This way, site visitors can read the conclusion first, which in this case is what your organisation actually does. If they want to know any more, they can then continue reading or jump to another section of the page. (To see front-loading in action, read any newspaper article.)

Exceptions

So, does every website need to tell users what the organisation does in these four different places? Well, not necessarily. We all know what Mastercard and McDonalds do, so it could definitely be argued that websites for household names need not explicitly say what they do. What these sites should do instead is tell us what the website offers, and this message can (and should) be put across in any of the above four ways – how else will site visitors quickly be able to find this out?

Conclusion

People are going to visit your site who don’t know what you do. Before you can even begin selling to them you must tell them what your organisation and website does. In addition to fulfilling site visitors’ immediate need (finding out what you do) you’ll also be boosting your search engine rankings. If your organisation is a household name, then instead of explaining what you do, it may be wise to tell site visitors what they can do on your website.