Domain names and why you need one

A domain name is a necessity for a serious commercial site. Domains are treated better by search engines and a good domain is an advertisement in itself.

Where can you get one?

registrars listed

How they affect search engines

Domains are treated better by search engines and a good one is an advertisement in itself. Better still, if your site is all about collecting false teeth, and you are lucky enough to register collecting-false-teeth.com as well as collectingfalseteeth.com then every time someone types collectingfalseteeth in the space for a URL, the browser will complete it and send them to http://collectingfalseteeth.com/index.html

That means that you don't even need to be found by a search engine. BUT
Search engines hate the hundreds of "free web sites" out there. Some they ignore. Others they give negative marks, so you would need lots of positive marks to compensate.

So forget the free sites.

Why not use your provider?

1. Your URL will be something long and ugly like http://www.yourISPdomain.com.au/members/~JohnDoe/index.html which nobody will remember, and may line-wrap in the middle if you send someone the URL by e-mail.
2. Your ISP may not allow you to put up a commercial site.
3. Your ISP may not provide log files for a commercial site.
4. Your site may be limited to five megabytes, which is fine for a non-commercial site.
5. If you decide to change your ISP to get better facilities, you will have to try to remember everywhere that you advertised your old URL and re-advertise the new URL, and tell all the search engines about your new URL, and cancel the old search listings. Hopefully you will have millions of eager visitors who have bookmarked your wonderful site for future visits. You will lose all the visitors from bookmarks when you change your URL.
6. Many ISPs will not allow CGI scripts. This is because hackers can interfere and crash the system.

When you choose to have a domain name, you join the big leagues.

1. Without your own, you raise a big question of credibility in every visitor's mind.
2. Your e-mail will be more professional. sales@smarterhomebiz.com instead of JoeBloggs@hotmail.com
3. Domain names and websites are very cheap today. This is because over 99% of websites fail, so your host isn't going to have to accept many pages from you and he can still collect your four dollars whether you succed or fail. There is a better way with a higher success rate, and I'll tell you about it later.
4. You should be planning to become a well-known business on the Web. Your domain will then be your instantly recognisable trademark.
5. You can take it with you when you move from one host to another. If you get your host to register your name for you, ask him to name you as the administrative and billing contact.

   Then visit whois . Enter your new name, and read through all the information about it to make sure it has been done properly. It is probably worth while to bookmark WhoIs. I keep using it to check up on other people's domains. You probably will want to do the same.

6. You can make it advertise your business (if nobody has already got it).
7. Many hosts provide a "catchall" e-mail address, so called because it catches all the names before the @ sign. That is, an address of anything-you-like@yourdomain.com will still reach you. If you put out ten adverts requiring an e-mail response, you can use ten different e-mail addresses such as adv1@yourdomain.com, adv2@yourdomain.com etc.
8. If you have hundreds of web pages on the same theme, all on the same overall subject, the search engines will consider the overall site content, and rank the keywords involved very highly.
9. Last, but not least, the search engines love them. Some of them even consider the keywords in the name, particularly if you separate them with dashes like this smart-home-biz.com, but there are disadvantages in this (see how to choose your name.

How to choose your name