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Every minute, more than 70 new domain names are registered on the internet. In addition, 571 new websites are created every minute. Currently, there are close to a billion domains, however, it has been estimated that up to 70% of these domains are parked and not in use. No matter, even with at least 280 million active domains, there is still a lot of competition for views and clicks.
If you want to have your own website, careful planning is required from the very beginning. To get some ideas, owners use domain name generators for inspiration. Once you have a name, you should take the necessary steps beginning with domain name registration. The right domain and hosting can be a big help in any subsequent efforts to promote your website.
The actual procedure for securing a domain name is usually shielded from the eyes of the domain name owner. The procedure they follow is usually a simplified version which is a lot easier to do and understand. Even then, there are some things that a company or person who wants to have their own website should do so that they would not run into any troubles later on. The following short list of things to do can help to promote the website when it is already live and running.
1. Choosing the Right Domain Name
Not many website owners know that the simplest way to help promote their website is to have their keywords in the domain name. If you are already a big company with offices in different countries, you can keep your company name as the domain name. However, if you are a small or medium company which serves a small community, it would be wise to have your nature of business in the domain name. If you are selling shoes, you should make that clear in the domain name. Adding “shoestore” in your domain name can help visitors easily find your site. It will also help search engines in properly indexing your site. You can also register unique domain name suffixes, that can help communicate what your site is about. For example, the .beer suffix could be a great one for a pub, .fitness for a gym, and so forth. These contribute to user experience of those who come up on your site.
2. Length of service
Search engines put credibility and authority in high regard. In this respect, if you signed up to own your domain name for the next three years, then the search engines will take that into account, and assign you more credibility than if you only signed up for one year. If you signed up for three years, search engines would think that you are serious in the business, whereas if you only signed up for one year, you might be a fly by night operation.
3. Alternative domain names
It is common for websites to redirect from one domain name to another. These include owning and redirecting from different extensions, like “.com”, “.org”, “.net”, and others. There are also instances when the redirection is from one service to another. For instance, “mail.google.com” redirects to “gmail.com”. The domain names may be different, but the website is the same. This is both a convenience for website visitors, as well as a security feature for large companies. They want to make sure that nobody hijacks or impersonates their domain name. It is easy enough for phishing email attempts to dupe users into their schemes with the use of fake domain names which look like the real domains. If possible, buy the other domain names which sound like or look like your domain name.
4. Website hosting company
Not all web hosting services are created equal. You should look towards the support that a company provides, not only on the cost of services. In the long run, you would need all the help you can get including web hosting support in order to keep your website running with almost zero downtime.
5. Add-on services
Each web hosting company has their own add-on services. These include email, cloud services, as well as migration from another web hosting service. Look towards these services and see whether you might need any of them. It is sometimes not as easy to migrate from a shared hosting service to a virtual machine setup, or even to a multiple server setup. These are services which only the web hosting company can help you with.
Once you have your own domain name registered and you have signed with a web hosting firm, you should take the time to study the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document can help you a lot in creating your own website and to help it rank on search engine results pages. It is also highly recommended that you keep yourself updated with this document as Google updates it without any notice.
Image from http://blog.marcaria.com/2016/03/31/what-are-the-most-common-domain-extensions/
