This could be one of the most important steps you take when creating your BANS websites, i’ll outline the main things to look out for when picking a domain name.
Note: A domain is a lease/renting of internet real estate, you never actually ‘own the domain’ but its yours for as long as you want it. For example; say you wanted to register a domain for 1 year, 60 days before that year of registration is up, you will get an email, asking if you want to renew it, if you do, you pay for another year etc… you don’t pay the domain goes back out for someone else to register, so make sure you RENEW your domains, especially if your doing all this promoting, because the last thing you want is for it to be released and someone else snap it up, because revenue & traffic generating domains get picked up almost immediately after they are dropped, i’ve seen it happen.
You going to need to ask yourself a few questions when buying a domain name;
Do you want a New fresh name? (If so i suggest godaddy.com i’ve not had any problems with them, there the number one register in the world, you can read some of the many reviews on godaddy here
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or if you wish to pick another domain register, check out the reviews on the leading domain registers online here.
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Do you want a old name, e.g. registered back in 2005 etc.
The problem when registering a new name is that google and other search engines may think your site is a Spam website, as from experience almost all spam websites are created and immediately put into operation, and quickly banned from search engines. One way to over come this is to register your domain for more than one year, i read somewhere on the buildanichestore.com forum that registering it for 2 or 3 years etc, reoves some posibility that its not a spammy website, i personally found that it made little difference to my performance in the search engines. So if people want to register older names, which may already be indexed in the search engines (which is a good thing) can do so, but i’d expect to be paying a little more than the domain registration fee.
If you are opting for an older domain, your going to have to buy it off someone, there are many marketplaces where you can buy domains from people, below i’ve listed a few which i check every day.
http://www.namepros.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24
https://www.tdnam.com/trphome.aspx
http://acorndomains.co.uk
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/
http://sedo.com
http://ebay.com
http://DNForum.com
http://BQB.com
Other things to look for when picking a domain, apart from age, you need to be looking at quality, and as were about 10 years into the .com boom period, the quality is going to be quite poor, especially for .com domains, for exaple your not going to pick up name like designershoes.com etc, you need to be a little more creative with it, such as try searching for domains like, discounted-designer-shoes.com i know it may look ugly, but the way we are going to market our websites isn’t from type in traffic, or branding as such, its positioning in the search engines, for specific keywords related to our niche.
The domain Extension is an important issue i think, if you are going to be creating a .co.uk domain i’d first suggest getting one from http://123-reg.co.uk i use them and there great! Also your more likely to find a better domain with other extensions rather than the .com/.net and .co.uk will be rated higher than .us in the UK search engines etc.
If your stuck on what domain extension to use, i suggest you go over to http://eurodns.com it give you a great search for your domain for many different extensions at once, so you can see which domain has been taken.
If your really trying to get good results fast in the search engines,, try looking for a domain with lots of backlinks already in place, i use this tool but there are many others out there. Also try and get a Page ranked domain, use this tool to check your page rank, before you buy, there are many fake page ranks out there.
I think thats the basics of buying a domain covered, if you have any questions, please ask.