Before I got my first website the whole area of web hosting and domain names was a mystery to me. That was two years ago and now I have a web hosting account that allows me to do whatever I want with blogs, websites and domain names all for less than $10 a month. It is important to use an established web host with a good reputation for reliability, and I have found all that with Hostgator. I moved my domains to them over a year ago and the hosting just ticks along without giving me any hassle. I can install unlimited domains and subdomains on my account. I can also use thousands of email addresses and redirects on my domains, which looks more professional than a free email address. Read more »

Choosing the right domain name for your business is important, and a good domain name can help your search engine ranking and, of course, be more memorable for your visitors.

Here are some tips in getting the right domain name for you:

• Be creative. The register of domain names is massive and you may think all the best names have been taken. With a bit of lateral thinking you could locate a name as good as flickr (TM) or Youtube. I am not a fan of del.icio.us - look at the punctuation they had to insert in the middle of the name. Are your customers going to remember a complicated address like that?
• Keep your domain name as short as possible so your visitors can tell each other about it or type the name into a web browser
• Buy the domain names for the most common mis-spellings of your name, then you can redirect visitors to the right page
• Do not try to be clever by using trademarked names. They have very well paid lawyers who will find you and your site could be closed down overnight.

Finally, always buy your domain name direct from a reputable domain name registrar, do not allow it to be registered on your behalf as part of some special hosting deal. A domain name costs about $8 per year, and good web hosting is about $10 a month, pay it yourself and make sure that you own and control your own business - if you want to know more about why you should register your own domain name, read more …

Here is the HTML code you need to redirect the entire contents of your blogspot blog to a new URL. It will work whether visitors click on the main blog address or the individual post URL. I am using this for my redundant blogspot addresses as I move them to wordpress software hosted on my webhost servers. I cannot get the complete code to print in blogger, you can see it in full over here.

My blog and domain spring cleaning is going quite well. But I tried to move one of my domains that is hosted on Blogger yesterday and it resulted in a 404 - not found page. Not good for the site or for my stress levels! I cannot find the problem: this is what happens.
- When I point the domain to blogger all goes well
- If I try to publish it on my own webhost server through FTP there is a ‘page not found’ result
- If I try to move it across to my own webhost server through wordpress there is a ‘page not found’ result
In the end I had to leave for now. It is too easy to spend hours tinkering with the code and gaining very little for all your hard work.

I wrote a post about my experiences of setting up some new ‘free’ domain names, which are now happily set up at my usual domain name registrar and web hosting company. Next I needed to deal with sending visitors from the old subdomain to the new domain. I loaded up the files via the FTP server to the new domain control panel. My big concern was to avoid a duplicate penalty form running the two sets of files at the same time. The web hosting CP allows a redirect to be placed on teh domain, but then I discovered that I could place a redirect in the .htaccess file from the old domain to the new one. The content of my .htaccess file now reads ‘redirect 301 / http://www.top-dog-tips.com/’ Problem solved - all existing traffic is sent to the new domain and I can remove the old files to avoid duplicate problems.
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Even my dog now has his own domain name - this is not just a whim of an indulgent pet owner, there is a reason why we did this. Kevin the Collie has had a dog training blog for almost a year and we set up a blogspot blog at first, but in the longer term his own domain name will make a big difference to search engine results. The domain name also improves his chances of being paid for posting on his blog and linking to other sites. A domain name costs less than $10 a year, which soon pays for itself and helps keep him in dog biscuits.

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I have set up a new domain for Kevin the Collie’s website, after hosting it on a subdomain for more than six months. Cheapskate, I know, but at first we thought it was just a side interest. We really concentrated on his dog training blog at first, and that is still successful. Then in December I got an offer for five completely free domain names, from a domain registrar that was new to me - and shall remain nameless. Of course I took it, hoping to save some cash. Big mistake! I could not get them loaded on to my web hosting company DNS servers. I have done this before with other domains form other registrars so I know I was not making any mistakes. Despite numerous contacts with the Help Desk the action was aborting every time. In the end I simply left the for the 60 day period to pass, after which I moved them to my usual domain name registrar. To move the domains I had to pay their usual fee, so in the end I saved nothing and got loads of hassle in the process. The moral is: free domains are never worthwhile. If you want to know the name of the first domain name registrar, leave me your details and I will let you know. I am certainly not going to give them a link back!

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I have seen a lot of opinions on the most effective way to form a domain name - there is even a conference on the subject here in London next month. I thought this was a useful article on the subject:

SEO: Should You Use Dashes, Underscores or Neither in Domain Names and URL’s
One of the biggest challenges we face as internet business owners is trying to secure domain names that have the keywords we need to help in the Search Engine Optimization process. Over the last few years the number of domains being registered has grown exponentially and Internet marketers are now reverting to domain names that use a combination of dashes, however you need to be careful using dashes in the domain names because you can in fact make it very difficult for a client to actually remember your website and come back to it if they did not add it to their favorites. In the long run, this can challenge the ability of your business to grow.

From a number of focus groups we have run in Australia and also in conversation with our customers, we have found that a Domain Name which uses dashes is in fact harder for a customer to remember then without.

If you were choosing a Key Word Rich Name the best choice would be to have the domain with no dashes. For example if I was trying to setup a domain for a car detailing service in Los Angeles, the best non-company name specific domain for the location would be -
LosAngelesCarDetailingService.com

The key advantage of this name is that customers will easily remember the name because there are no dashes. This domain also makes it far easier for people to remember if they see the domain using off-line marketing techniques like bumper bar stickers. The domain name is also far easier for you as the business owner to explain to the client to lookup on the web.

For example we could have rewritten this domain with dashes which would have made it harder to remember- Los-Angeles-Car-Detailing-Service.com

The other issue you need to be very cautious of doing is using a combination of dashes and underscores in URL’s. In a recent survey my company did of 200 keywords in the three major search engines, we found that more and more companies are registering domains with dashes and then use the alternative with the file names. Let me show you an example …

Los-Angeles-Car-Detailing-Service.com/Platinum_Car_Cleaning-Service.asp

You can see in the URL above that we have used a combination of dashes and underscores. Doing this is really poor practice because if a person visits your website and wants to get back to the page above, they will get mixed up as to whether they should be using underscores or dashes.

When using underscores or dashes in your URL, make sure that you stay consistent and only use either all dashes or all underscores. It is unwise to use a combination of these elements as shown above.

Look the bottom line is this; from a client user perspective the best domain to register is one without spaces. If that domain is not available then use one with dashes. With URL’s never mix dashes and underscores period.

One of the other issues you need to be cautious about when registering a domain is to not make the domain name to long. In online advertising sites like Google Adwords the domain name display allows only a maximum of 35 characters. If your domain name is longer than 35 characters you will not be able to type it into the Display URL box the domain which will mean if you do not display the right URL then Google will ban your Adwords campaign. In the examples I used above I would not be able to run an Adwords campaign because the number of characters in the domain exceeds the Display URL’s capability and as such limits your advertising options for pay-per-click advertising.

Choosing the right domain is an important step and if you get it wrong it can limit your abilities to market your website and cost you money.

by Chris Le Roy - For other great online and offline marketing ideas visit our website Online Marketing Business Opportunity.

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If you have any domains that you are not using at the moment, you can park them and make a residual income from them. The way it works is this - you direct your domain names to your Domain Parking Company’s DNS Servers.
It is really simple to register with a reputable agency like Name Drive, and you start earning extra income from visits to your web page. When a visitor lands there, they see a page of search results that are related to the name or subject of your domain. As they click on any of the sponsored links, you earn money in the same way as Google Adsense or other Pay Per Click advertising. It is free to register, your domain can be earning residual income within hours.

Each time a surfer clicks on one of these sponsored links you earn an income, similar to using any other Pay Per Click search engines or publishing network.

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