Registration of domain names

You need 2 things for your website to be available to worldwide visitors: a domain name and a hosting service.

If you're not familiar with TLDs and the basics of the domain name system, read our Glossary below.

Choosing a domain name

When choosing a domain name , you have to take into account a few essential factors. Before anything, be prepared with a bunch of possible names, because someone else may have already reserved some of your preferred domain names.

Choosing the TLD: Is your website aimed at visitors form a particular geographic region/location?

• If your answer is yes, it's best for your bussiness to be associated with the geo location. (For example, if i target EU visitors, I would buy a .eu. If I sell furniture in Belgium only, I would buy a .be)
• If your answer is no, then you must be targeting a worldwide audience. You should buy a "global" domain. Choose the TLD by the nature of your activities. A .com is suited for commercial websites, a .net for network and communications, a .org for non-profit organisations.

Choosing the domain name: Search engines and branding

When choosing a domain name, there are some things you should take into account

• People should be able to easily memorize your domain name. For this reason, it must be short, meaningful, and, if possible, you should avoid dashes and underscores. You could even invent a whole new word, its novelty may catch on.
• Search engines put some weight on keywords in your domain name. You could rank higher if proper keywords are included in the domain name.
• We recommend not to abuse the keywords, limit yourself to one or two. (for example, widgetscalifornia.com is better than buy-widgets-cheap-widgets-california.com)
• If you're a well known local or global  brand, it's better for the long term to use your brand name instead of keywords related to your activity (for example, companyNameWidgets.com is better than GetCheapWidgetsinCalifornia.com; here we used another technique, combining a keyword with the company name, while taking care to keep the name short and simple).

Take a look at youtube.com: this word never existed before, but it has become a brand and a high volume search keyword through the value of the website itself. The website content and quality is much more important than stuffing keywords in the domain name in hope of quickly achieving high traffic from search engines.

After buying the domain name, you need to purchase a hosting subscription, and upload your website. This will be covered in another TeachMeJoomla tutorial. Good luck!

Quick link:

www.GoDaddy.com - Domain name registration and website hosting

Glossary

A domain name is an unique name. Just like a postal address clearly and uniquely identifies a place on Earth, a domain name is an unique identifier for a place on the internet.

A domain name is an unique combination of a custom name and a TLD.If we take example.com, 'example' is the custom part, while '.com' is the TLD (Top level Domain). You can think of TLDs as spaces, or categories(just like states are for postal addresses). TlDs are (generally) fixed, there are several of them: .com, .org. .net, .info, .name. Additionally, a 2 letter TLD exists for every country (.us for USA, .uk for United Kingdom, .eu for the European Union, and so on).

The registration of a domain name is the process of purchasing a domain name (if it's still available, i.e. nobody has registered it before). There are companies named 'registrars' which intermediate this process.

Links:

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