Working out how to buy a domain name can be confusing if you are starting out.

Here are a few pointers to help simplify the process:

We will assume you are buying a domain for a blog or website which will be developed over time. Further you want to rank as high as possible in search engines.

Theme and Keywords – The first step is to decide the theme of your website then build a list of keywords that people might search for your site with. The Digitalpoint keyword suggestion tool can help build your list.

Find a free domain name – Finding a domain name you are comfortable with and which is available is the hardest part of the process. A site I use quite often to find available domains is Domainsbot . This gives a good number of suggestions for alternatives, as well as cheeking the specific domain you are interested in.

A couple of notes about domain names. Almost everyone will have a different view on this, so please just take these as my suggestions:

  • Always buy .com extensions. Search engines seem to prefer them over other options (.net .info etc ). They are generally easier to sell and fetch higher prices than other extensions.
  • Try to keep your domain name as short as possible.
  • Do include your main keyword in your domain name. It seems to help with type-in traffic. For this blog, if I had my time again, I would have picked a domain with “home business” included in the name. This would give me a slighter better edge in the Serps for my most important keywords.
  • Try not to have hyphens or numbers in the domain name. Reduces value later on if you decide to sell.

Register your domain name – Having selected a suitable free domain name, you now need to register it. My top pick for domain name registration is Godaddy. They have a quick easy registration process which often has the domain name registered and fully working in under an hour. Their domain management tools are very easy to use. Godaddy have some fairly aggressive “up-sell” marketing which you can just ignore if all you need is domain registration.

With Godaddy once the domain is registered it is also “parked” with them. This simply means that have your URL pointing to one of their own web pages. At this point you just need to login, go to the control panel and either change the nameservers to point to those of your host, or forward the domain to your desired affiliate/landing page.

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