In This Chapter

• Choosing your domain name
• Registering your domain name
• Understanding country codes and top-level domains
• Securing domains for common misspellings of your name
• Considering domains with alternate extensions
• Choosing the right hosting solution
• Knowing how search engines view subdomains

Shakespeare once said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” implying that a name doesn’t affect an object’s essential makeup. That may be true, but a website isn’t a rose — your site’s name is critical to its success. Your domain name (the root of your site’s URL address, such as yourdomain.com) must be chosen strategically, based on your business goals. Pick a good domain name, and you’ve got a foundation for a successful online presence.

In this chapter, we explain some guidelines for selecting an appropriate domain name for your website. You discover the basics, like how to register for a domain name and how to pick a hosting service to get your site up and running. You also find out about securing variations of your domain name in order to protect your brand (company name) in the long term.

Selecting Your Domain Name

Picking the right domain name for your website depends on your business strategy. You need to decide how you want people to find you on the web. You have basically two ways to approach choosing a domain name — by brand or by keywords (search terms that people might enter to find what your site offers).

If you have a unique brand name and want people to be able to find your website by searching for your brand, secure your brand as your domain. Having a brand for your domain name makes sense if any of the following is true:

• Your brand is already established and recognized (Nike, Xerox, and so on).
• You’ve advertised or you plan to advertise to promote your brand.
• Your brand is your own name (such as Bruce Clay, Inc.) or very unique.
• You want your site to rank well in search results for your brand name.

As an alternative, you can choose a domain name that contains keywords that identify what your business does. For instance, if your business is called Marty’s Auto but your website is focused on your classic-car customization business, you might choose classiccarcustomization.com as a domain name rather than martysauto.com. Search engines can parse the domain name to recognize the distinct words classic car customization, and your keyword-laden domain name could make your site more relevant to searches for those terms. Exact-match domains, which are domains that have the exact query as their URL, used to be rewarded with higher search rankings in the past. However, you don’t want to stuff or repeat keywords in a domain name today, as that’s the kind of thing Google and other search engines see as a red flag (as the sidebar “Beware keyword-stuffed domain names!” later in this chapter explains). Although the business name Marty’s Auto doesn’t identify what services you really offer — it could be auto sales, auto repair, or something else auto-related — it is a unique brand name that you can build over time and achieve reputation and rankings for, at least in local search. (You learn about ranking in the local search results in Book V, Chapter 4.)

You may run into problems getting your first choice of domain name because someone has already registered it. People often buy domain names that they don’t intend to use, just so they can turn around and sell them later. Your desired domain may fall into that category, in which case you can try to contact the domain owner and negotiate to buy it. However, that isn’t always possible, especially when the domain is legitimately operating as a thriving website. So in this case, you need to be creative and start thinking of alternative domain names that would work for your website.

Here are a few points to keep in mind when you try to come up with a good domain name:

• Length: A short domain name is better than a long one. There are three reasons why: The URL string for your files can be shorter, and people tend to avoid clicking long URL links on search results pages; a short URL is easier to remember than a long one; and there are fewer opportunities for typos when someone enters your URL in a browser window or sets it up as a link.

• Multiple words: Search engines have no trouble parsing words that are concatenated (run together without spaces). Most website domains for businesses with multiple-word brand names run the words together, such as bankofamerica.com, bestwestern.com, and so on. Concatenating domain names is the best practice. However, sometimes, you may need to separate words visually to make them easier for users to understand. When you must separate words, use a hyphen. The search engines interpret hyphens as word spaces; underscores (_) don’t work well because they count as alphanumeric characters. Imagine that you own a tailoring business called the Mens Exchange and that you're interested in branding exactly that name. But wait a second: The domain mensexchange.com could be parsed two ways. To make sure the site name isn’t misunderstood, a hyphen is needed; mens-exchange.com prevents any misunderstandings.

  We recommend that you use no more than one hyphen (or two, at the most) in a domain name — more than that can make your site look suspicious to the search engines, like spam (deliberately using deceptive methods to gain ranking for irrelevant keywords). Although none of the engines ban you for having a multihyphenated domain name, they may still think that your domain buy-cheap-pills-and-try-free-poker-here.com looks a little suspicious. What's more, your visitors do, too.

• Articles: Part-of-speech articles such as a, an, and the may help you create a unique domain if they make sense within your name. For instance, Hershey’s has a website at hersheys.com that’s consumer-targeted and all about chocolate. But for its investors, the company has a separate domain at thehersheycompany.com that’s full of company-related news and information. In most cases, however, you won’t need the article, so don't worry about it.

You also want to consider your future plans as much as possible. It might be hard to foresee how your business may change and expand, but try to avoid boxing yourself in. For example, Marty’s Auto might decide to branch out and also do classic car brokering and resale, or possibly include current-model car customization, bicycle customization, or another type of expanded service. In those cases, the domain name classiccarcustomization.com may become too restrictive in the long run.

As a general rule, you want to choose a domain name that will last. This makes sense from a usability point of view because you want your customers to rely on your website, bookmark it, and come back often. It’s also important from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. The search engines consider domain age as a factor when ranking sites. The longer your domain has been continuously registered and active on the web, the higher your score is for the age factor. Granted, this is only one of more than 200 different ranking factors Google considers, but that doesn’t make it insignificant. Because competition can be so tight on the web, you want every advantage you can legitimately get.

Remember in the 2008 Summer Olympics, when Michael Phelps won a swimming relay by ¹/₁₀₀th of a second? That was in a field of only eight swimmers. When you consider how many thousands of competitors you could face on the web, you see why every little advantage can make such a big difference. In SEO, you need to sweat the small stuff. Having a domain that endures is a small thing that can pay off big with long-term customers and search engine rankings.

Registering Your Domain Name

To find out whether a domain has already been taken, start by just typing it into the address bar of your web browser and seeing what comes up. If you see an error message saying Address Not Found or something similar, you might think you’re in luck and have located an available domain. But sometimes a domain may be taken even though no site displays, or it may look taken when in fact the domain holder would like to transfer it to someone else.

A more foolproof way to check for available domains is to go to a domain name registrar (a company accredited and authorized to register Internet domain names) and use its domain name search tool. A domain name search tells you whether the name is available and then quotes prices to register it to you if it is. Domain name registrars we recommend are

• Register.com (www.register.com)
• Moniker (www.moniker.com)
• GoDaddy.com (www.godaddy.com)
• Namecheap (www.namecheap.com)
• Whois.Net (http://whois.net)
• Domain.com (www.domain.com)
• Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com)

Also check with your website hosting company to see what it can do for you. Many provide all the same services as a domain name registrar.

If a domain is available, you can claim it on the registrar’s website. The standard price to register a .com domain name is $9.95 a year or greater (international domains can cost much more), although you may be able to secure it for two or more years up front at a discount.

In the future, you’ll need to renew your domain name registration. You don’t buy a domain name; they’re only licensed for a period of time. So when your current registration is near its expiration date, you need to re-register it and then repeat this process throughout the life of your website.

If a domain name you really want is already taken, according to a domain name search, look at the website that uses the domain name. See if it looks like a real site doing business or just a placeholder site or, better yet, if it just brings up an error. All these could indicate that people have registered the domain name but haven’t gotten around to creating a site yet — or that they don’t intend to. Domains are often purchased on speculation and sold later. In these cases, you may be able to negotiate with the domain holder to obtain the domain. There’s no telling what the initial price might be that the domain holder would require, but it may be worth it to you to negotiate a deal. Some sites, such as Moniker (www.moniker.com), also operate periodic auctions where domains are auctioned by their holders.

You can find out the name and contact information of the registered domain holder by using the WHOIS Lookup tool on the home page at http://whois.net. Then try your best persuasive techniques and see what happens.

Covering All Your Bases

You may want to register other domains, in addition to your main URL. Often companies try to cover all their bases — not just to attract more traffic (visitors) to their sites, but to protect their brand and their future online business, as well. Securing other domain names besides your primary domain can be a proactive step for your website, but you want to do it strategically. This section covers why you might want to have more than one URL. We also help you understand the variety of choices beyond the .com domains, so you can make informed decisions.

Misspellings

Another good idea is to register domains that are commonly misspelled versions of your main domain name. Not only might this help you rank better for your misspelled brand name in the search engines, it also helps you capture the direct type-in traffic, or the people who type a URL directly into the address bar of a web browser. Figure 2-1 shows a typed-in URL, which bypasses the search engines and takes the user straight to a website (assuming the URL is entered correctly).

Google, for example, has covered its bases by securing close misspellings of its domain name. If you type www.gogle.com into your browser’s address bar and press Enter, you instantly get redirected to www.google.com. This also works with www.googlee.com because Google has registered it, too.

To support your www.classiccarcustomization.com website, you might want to pick up the misspelled versions (such as www.classicarcustomization.com), as well as the hyphenated versions www.classic-car-customization.com and www.classiccar-customization.com, and then redirect them all to your primary site. For ideas on the common misspellings of your brand name, look no further than your customer correspondence (such as letters and emails).

Consider all the ways that people might try to find you, and make all paths lead to your site. Secure all the different variations of your actual domain name that are available and make sense.

Pointing Multiple Domains to a Single Site Correctly

After you’ve registered a bunch of domains, you need to know what to do with them. Having multiple domains all point to a single website is usually bad for search engine optimization because the search engines think you’re trying to index multiple websites using the same content. They can tell that it’s duplicate content (by matching long text strings, file sizes, and so on), and they usually use only one site and throw the others out of their search results.

You can correct this problem by using an IP funnel. This is a method for funneling many domains to a single canonical site (your primary, main website) correctly, so that search engines won’t view your multiple sites as deceptive or misleading.

With an IP funnel, you don’t have to host all your different domains and set up redirects on them. (Redirects are HTML code that automatically forwards links to a different page.) Instead, you only have to host two domains — your canonical site plus one other domain, and then “funnel” the other domains to the canonical site domain. You save money and effort and prevent duplicate content.

An IP funnel corrects the problem of multiple domains pointing to the same content. Figure 2-2 shows how you could set up an IP funnel to reroute many different domains to your canonical site domain.

Most domain name registrars provide the ability to “point” or “forward” domains to another site. If you had six extraneous domains in addition to your main site domain, you would first choose one of the six to be your “feeder site” because it “feeds” all traffic to your canonical site. All the other five domains should point to the feeder site (not to your canonical site). These five extra domains do not need to be hosted on a server; you can just have all requests for those URLs forwarded automatically to your feeder site.

The feeder site (we call it www.feeder.com for our example) should be hosted, but it doesn’t need to have a visible user interface. The feeder site only needs to have two files:

www.feeder.com/index.htm
www.feeder.com/robots.txt

The index.htm file has an optimized Title tag, Meta description tag, and Meta keywords tag. It also includes a Meta refresh statement and a Meta robots "noindex" command.

You can leave the robots text file blank. It just needs to exist so that when the search engine spiders go looking for it, they aren’t met with an error. For more on creating a robots text file, see Chapter 1 of this minibook.

The last thing you need to add is a 301 Redirect command (server code that indicates where the site has permanently moved) to the feeder site. You want to redirect the feeder site domain to your main site so that any links are passed automatically. The feeder site can then correctly redirect traffic to your “real” site.

Choosing the Right Hosting Provider

Deciding where to host your website is very important. Pick a reliable host, and managing your site can be fairly headache-free. Choose a bad one, and you could have a nightmarish experience with unreturned calls, unanswered emails, and a website that visitors can’t access.

Unless you have your own server and other equipment in-house, and the technical know-how or staff to run them, you’re going to need a website hosting provider. Hosting providers are third-party companies that lease out web space by month or by year, similar to office space. In addition to space on their servers, they offer varying degrees of additional services.

The following list explains the key things you should ask about when you research hosting providers. Keep in mind, however, that what works for your friend’s site won’t necessarily work for yours. Factors include the amount of traffic your site receives, how complex your site or application is, how much storage space you need, and so on. The best hosting provider is the one that meets your needs and provides the right balance between quality and value.

• Customer service: One of the most important elements of a good hosting provider is its level of service, which can range widely. How easy is it to contact the provider for support, and how quick and helpful is its response? You can get a feel for this by asking a few questions of different providers in advance. Don’t let them intimidate you with technical-speak. They should be willing to answer your questions promptly and in an understandable way, or they aren’t the people you want to work with.
• Server: The type of server software the provider uses is critical. To ensure enough flexibility for SEO, make sure you go with either an Apache server or a Microsoft IIS server. (Chapter 1 of this minibook explains more about the servers.)
• Dedicated versus shared IP: If you have a small site that’s just getting started, you might initially share an IP address with other sites. (An IP [Internet Protocol] address is the numeric code that identifies the logical address of a server or a computer on the web.) Having an IP that hosts only your website, however, is preferred for many SEO-related reasons. This is called a dedicated IP. Here are good things to find out from a prospective hosting provider:
  • If you have to share the IP, ask how many sites share it (the fewer, the better).
  • Ask whether it offers dedicated IPs and find out how you can get one.
• Uptime: The percentage of time the site is up and running, not including scheduled maintenance periods. A guaranteed uptime of 99 percent is not uncommon, so make sure you’re contractually covered.

• Bandwidth: The amount of bandwidth available to your site determines how much traffic your site can comfortably handle. Bandwidth refers to the flow of data transferring over an Internet connection. You can think of it like a pipe — the pipe’s diameter determines how many gallons of water can flow through it at the same time. The bigger the pipe, the more water it can transfer. The higher the bandwidth, the greater the number of consecutive visitors your website can handle. You need more bandwidth in any of the following situations:

  • Your site has a large number of pages.
  • Your site has a lot of regular traffic at peak periods.
  • Your site serves many Flash and sound files or has large images, audio, video, or other elements that require a lot of bandwidth to display.

  Very large or application-intensive websites that need maximum connectivity should find a hosting provider that’s physically located on what’s known as the Internet backbone. This refers to the main hub connections of the Internet, which are primarily located in major cities around the world (Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and so on). A site right on a hub means that data can transfer to and from the site faster than if it had to travel through multiple spokes to reach the server.

• Storage: File storage space is cheap, and most hosting providers give out a generous amount, even to the smallest sites. However, more storage space is needed if you plan to have a ton of image, audio, or video files on your site. If you’re going to operate a social media site (a website that enables user participation and consists of user-generated content) where people can upload their own videos, for an example, you want to be prepared with lots of storage space to hold them.
• Server capacity: The processing power of the server. You know how a new computer always seems to work faster than the old one did? That’s because the new computer has a much more powerful processor. Similarly, server capacity affects the performance speed and capacity of your website. If your site application requires a lot of processing power, ask about how the host providers allocate server capacity and strongly consider requiring a dedicated IP.
• Scalability: The ability to expand your server resources, as needed. If and when your website business grows, you want to be able to scale your server resources up to deliver the same or better site performance. You also may want to add storage space, bandwidth, or server capacity to your site at peak times, or all the time. Make sure you have a flexible hosting environment that is easy to adjust as your site needs change.
• Clean IPs: You don’t want to move into a bad neighborhood, so you make sure that your site isn’t on a dirty IP address (the Internet Protocol numeric code that identifies the logical address of a server or a computer on the web). Because you have no way to know in advance what IP address you’ll get, make sure your service level agreement includes that you require a clean IP that’s not blacklisted (listed on anti-spam databases).

When researching hosting providers, look up online reviews written by current or former customers. These can be very insightful. Just remember that each website has different needs, so you have to take others’ comments with a grain of salt.

One last recommendation about choosing a hosting provider: Don’t consider it a permanent arrangement. You hold the rights to the domain and the site assets, and you can host them wherever you think best. Move to a new hosting provider if your current provider isn’t cutting it.

Understanding Subdomains

In the domain name system (DNS), a subdomain is a dependent domain set up within the primary domain. Here's an example: The following code shows the URL if you set up a subdomain called events in your classic-car customization business domain:

http://events.classiccarcustomization.com

events is the subdomain, .classiccarcustomization is the domain, and .com is the TLD.