Do-It-Yourself Ecommerce

A domain name is registered with a Registrar. It translates the IP Address given you by your web host into a name that people can understand. [background on how domain names work] You can register a domain name for under $10 a year, but you need to do a little research before that.

First, it has to be fairly brief. You may not want to use johndoeaccountingandbookkeeping.com, but johndoeaccounting.com will work well. Remember that your web address may be on business cards and letterheads. If people have to type it in rather than use a hyperlink they may not bother if it’s too long.

On the other hand, try not to use too many cryptic spellings, like ‘4u’ instead of ‘foryou’. When you mention your web site to people you don’t want to have to spell it out for them. For example, if you use accountants4u.com you will have to tell someone to go to “accountants number 4 letter u dot com”. Instead, make it easy to remember.

You may consider geographic name like mycityaccountants. You can hyphenate names like mycity-accountant.com Hyphenation was all the rage for awhile, using keywords to help the search engine rankings. Now the search engines don’t use domain names as much but it may help people make sense of your domain name.

It helps if the highest searched keywords relating to your business are in your domain name.

However, the name may already be taken. You can go here to research domain names. If a domain name you’re interested in is already taken, take a few minutes to go to that domain and see what your competition is doing.

TIP: Once you find the domain you want to register, go to what’s known as The Wayback Machine to see if the domain has been previously used and abandoned. It may have been banned by one or more of the search engines for using underhanded methods for Search Engine Optimization. The Wayback Machine is also a good way to tell how long your competition has had their web site.

You can have several domain names and use ‘domain forwarding’ to get them to your main site. For example you can register yourcity-accountant.com, but when someone clicks on that link it takes them to johndoeaccounting.com

You REALLY want a .com domain. If someone else has the .com domain and you use a .us or .net domain, it will be too confusing to your clients/customers. You just KNOW that some of them will go to the wrong site, although you yourself may want to register other TLD’s like .net and .us with your name so others can’t confuse their site with yours.

NOTE: The U.S. President’s web site is www.whitehouse.gov. For years www.whitehouse.com was a porn site. It pays to think ahead.