Domain-Guides

There I was. Waiting in the lobby to meet my next client.

“We’d recommend you name your new website William.com.”

Now unless they were talking to Bill Gates or Billy Graham, and I was quite sure neither of those would be the case; I couldn’t believe my ears. Their client was a home business time management consultant.No one would look for his website through Google or any other search engine using his first name. I wanted to get up and scream, STOP! But I think I was half stunned from the pure ignorance being displayed by people in my field..........

The domain name Myspace.co.uk has been wrestled from the grasp of the social networking site after an independent appeals panel overturned a previous decision to award it to the Rupert Murdoch-owned company. In January Nominet, the official registry of domain names in the UK, ruled in favour of Fox Interactive Media, despite the fact UK company TWS had registered the domain six years previously. TWS originally registered myspace.co.uk in August 1997 to provide its clients with a cheap and easy-to-use homepage and email address. Some 18 TWS customers still use @myspace.co.uk email addresses. The domain has been effectively parked around 2004 with Sedo, a company that targets advertising links on unused domains, according to The Register. In 2005, the Sedo algorithm began serving TWS’s domain with ads for services such as ‘MySpace Friend Adder’.........

Choosing a domain is one of the first steps in establishing an online presence. Changing a domain after-the-fact can be time consuming, and can be harmful to search engine ranking, so it is best to get it right the first time around. Follow these simple steps to select a domain name that will represent your online brand... 1. Nice Neighborhood Stick with .com or .net domains for businesses, .edu for schools, and .org for non-profit organizations. Some search experts say that any other extensions will have a more difficult time ranking well in the search engines. 2. Easy To Verbalize And Understand Domain names should be easy to verbalize. Often in conversations, similar sounds are difficult to discern. Select a domain name that is clear and easy to understand without having to repeat it. 3. Easy To Spell Select a domain that is easy to spell. Certain words can be spelled in a variety of ways, and this can cause confusion and result in people being unable to easily locate your website. Use a domain name that is intuitive and easy to spell. 4. Keep It Brief Shorter domains are easy to remember........

Last November, a site called Android Community posted a dicsussion thread titled "Squatting on Android Domains - Are You Guilty?" and then listed that Google had moved a large... ...collection of Android based domain names to point at Google DNS servers (though none resolve to a destination as of this evening). These domains are all based on the name for Google's mobile phone operating system and "Software Developers Kit" called - what else - Android. The Android Community owner, an Android enthusiast and apparent iPhone fan and retailer of accessories, Vincent Nguyen, admitted to having reserved a bunch of Android names himself. So in line with yesterdays post about Google-owned domain names related to Google products being protected by Markmonitor.com for Google. I took a look at the thirteen Android related domain names on the long list of those domains posted by Pingdom.com and discussed here yesterday, then did a bit of standard web searches to find the Android discussion forum post mentioned above in which Nguyen lists the 26 additional dot net and dot org domains reserved by Google and protected by MarkMonitor.com. Currently this list of domains all fail to resolve to any server..........

Turnkey sites

Here you construct a site that has as little as a simple layout and logo and market it to those who do not feel comfortable building a site. Sites can be cloned and only the logo and name changed effectively mass producing these sites. Personally I am not a fan of such a strategy nor do I participate in such a strategy and i might even go as far as to say, this is the spam of website development. The plan involves selling off a volume of these sites to make a reasonable profit and generally does not involve good domain names.

Domain Flipping

If you want to develop to purely increase resale value, then domain flipping may be for you. This involves building out a domain and using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to gain good search engine position and traffic. Reminiscent of house flipping, you need to set a time limit and budget (money and resources) and you need to have a clear idea of the market in which you are going to sell. There is no point in spending $2000 developing a domain and then try to sell a website in a market sector that will not support more than a $500 price point. A combination of technical skills, marketing and luck are involved in this strategy. SEO is mostly experience in my book........

While overall brand abuse continues to increase, the distribution of attacks is evolving over the past year. Cybersquatting continues to be the most common method observed with more than 380,000 exploits in the last quarter of 2007. This represents a 33 percent increase for the year. Using brand names as part of a domain name is an easy way to drive traffic through search engines, and since most common dictionary words are already used for domains, fraudsters and criminals continue to turn to brand names and trademarks when they register domains. We continue to observe sites that abuse popular children's brands and place offensive and adult content on the squatted domains.

The Internet has changed the world in astonishing ways—both good and bad—and all in the last 10 to 15 years. We marvel at the good: immediate access to even the most obscure information, free and secure worldwide person-to-person communication, and the ability to access almost any product or service with just the click of a mouse. But its mass appeal and reach combined with anonymity and complex, constantly evolving technologies also make the digital world an unsafe place. Criminals and hackers are wreaking havoc on increasing numbers of well-known brands for their own profit. These 'brandjackers' have fine-tuned the techniques of online marketing and are exploiting them to their advantage and at the expense of true brand owners. As a result, organizations face serious online threats to their reputations, customer relationships, and ultimately, their revenues...........

The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would guess by typing it into the browser, such as ford.com or dowjones.com or other such domains. But that's not the same as saying you can't find a good name, because you almost certainly can. (And even if it's not instantly guessable, modern search engines will soon find it if what you're doing has any value. The Idea Lab URL -- already in the top five items in a Google search on "Idea Lab" -- demonstrates that point.) I've worked on a bunch of new projects in recent years. Each time, we've had little or no trouble finding a useful domain name. In almost every case, the name was available for sale from one of the many registrars that are in this business; domain registrars charge different prices for this service but . On several occasions when someone else did own the name, we were able to buy it for an affordable amount..............