Domain Name Registration Tips
Registering your domain name is a very significant step in getting your website online. The choice of a good name is necessary to getting your website established and to perform well in the search engines.
A few years ago it was considered to be the best to register your domain name so that it contains your major keywords. To an extent that is still true, however, it depends on what the purpose of your website is.
1. If your website is meant to promote your business or company then it is best to use your company name or business name as your domain name. In other words, your website is part of your overall marketing strategy and the domain name, together with the graphical design of your site, will contribute to the overall corporate identity and will assist with branding your company or business.
2. If your business is more generic of nature or you are trading as a one-man show, then you would do well to choose a domain name that is short, easy to spell, easy to say and easy to remember. If you CAN incorporate a keyword somewhere in the name, so much the better but it is not the most important factor.
It is definitely important that your site name should be easy to spell since you will often have to spell this for people over the phone or when you give your email address.
3. If you are interested in using your website AS your business, in other words, you are an Internet entrepreneur and want to use your website as a means to making money through selling your own product or selling other people's products, or providing an on-line service, then by all means see if you can incorporate your main keywords into your domain name.
The advantage of doing this is that when you get links back to your website only through your URL, the link already has the keyword in the anchor text since your domain name IS your anchor text. This will give you a small edge in the search engines. Beware though of using too long, hyphenated domain names since the savvy searcher on the Internet knows by now that these types of names are typically associated with made-for-adsense or scraper type sites and there seems to be quite good evidence that the search engines might think so too.
A general tip is to register variants of the name and in as many of the top level domain name extensions as you can afford. You do not want to take the risk of building your corporate identity and discovering that your traffic is being stolen by typo-squatters who have registered small variants of the spelling of your domain name.
Last, but not least, make sure that you register your domain name independently of your web hosting company. The reason for this is that you should always maintain control over your own domain name. Too many hosting companies register domain names in their own name, which means that if some dispute arises, you will find it difficult to wrest the domain away from the website hosting company.

