Domain Registration

Domain Registration Tips

• In general, go for .co.uk domains as in travel industry you will be trying to attract UK web-visitors and registering a .co.uk domain is a way search engines know your target audience is UK. You might want to go for .com or .net if you will have general travel tips and are trying to make money from adsense rather than generating affiliate traffic for airlines, agencies and tour operators. In the case of adsense your visitors could be from any country and you can make money. Or you could be trying to attract visitors to the UK, then .com could be useful

• In terms of what you should go for my advice is to go for something as descriptive as possible. For example, if you have good knowledge of gambia then you might want to try gambiapackageholiday.co.uk. I think it’s useful to look at keyword searches in Google to give you an insight of what popular search terms are. You will find that a lot of your ideal domains are already taken so you might have to do a lot of searches. Sometimes the one you want is for sale though and can be picked up fairly cheaply. Sedo list 2 million domains for sale.

• Does hyphenating your domain-name help search engines or will it be just as effective as a non hyphenated domainname? I had been told many years ago that hyphenated was best for search engines if you have 2 or more words involved. However when I looked into this more recently it seems search engines are now clever enough to split out combinedwords in domain names so it doesn’t matter only to say that most people will more likely find your site naturally by a non hyphenated URL.

I have registered my domains at 1and1. I use 1and1 / 1&1 because when I was looking they were the cheapest way to register .co.uk domains. Every time I have checked they have been cheapest. It’s the 1and1 business model to offer domain registration cheap in the hope that clients will add extra services such as web hosting.

I find their control panel fine to use, if only a bit slow. It’s easy to forward domains and also switching blogger / blogspot blogs to the custom domain held by 1and1 was easy too. I have also bought a domain second hand from someone else and transferred it into 1and1 via nominet and that was trouble free and fee free. They do charge a transfer fee out though.

1&1 have an auto-renewal feature that will automatically charge you every time the contract runs out (typically after 2 years) and begin a new one. This is useful as you don’t want to have a domain you are using get bought up by someone else when it lapses, however if there are domains you no longer want then you need to tell 1&1. See the guide to cancelling auto-renewal of domains with 1and1

Possibly Related posts ? :

1. I bought a second hand domain name
2. Transferring a .co.uk domain with nominet to 1and1
3. Custom blogger domain using 1and1