The domain name you choose is very important for the success of your website. If you are serious about your online presence it is recommended that you come up with a nice name for your site and not settle with a free hosting service that is long and cumbersome to remember and recall.

There are a lot of benefits of having your own domain name. Listed below are a few of the most important ones:

• Having a personal domain name will enable having an address like http://www.yourcompany.com. On the other hand, a free domain name comes with http://www.freewebsite.com/yoursite; this is longer and harder for your customers to remember.
• Having your own domain name also builds up trust and credibility amongst your clients as they feel more comfortable and secure in the fact that it is an established company.
• With your own domain names come multiple emails at your domain that can be assigned to various functions of the site thus enabling flexibility and easy handling of customer requests.
• The home pages of a particular domain come up easily in internet searches as against those that are hosted on a free server. The index.html should be your own domain name to come up when a key word strikes!
• Some search engines will not be able to crawl down the sites that are hosted with free services. More often than not error messages like, ‘too many pages submitted’, ‘your URL is submitted for processing’ and other error crop up when you are trying to access these sites.

Other considerations before you decide upon a good domain name are as listed below:

• Size of Your Domain Name: Size is a very important factor in deciding your domain name – the smaller the better. Your visitors will easily remember a website name that is shorter and difficult to misspell.
• Easy to Remember Names: Most successful websites have easy to remember names like the ones you come across in your day to day life. Pick and choose the simplest one.
• Domain Names Need to Be Business Related: Domain names that are related to the product you are selling are always very useful. Try getting the product name as your domain name. An example would if you are selling arthritis shoes get a domain name like xyzarthritishoes.com.
• Competitors Domains: Always avoid picking names that are closely related to your competitors’ sites. Lest you lose your customers to them due to the confusing and similar names.
• Go For the .com! : People are used to the .com version much more than any thing else. Make .com your first choice of address. It is simple and more natural and people might just be able to find you on the net by typing in your brand’s name followed by the inevitable .com.

When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), people often overlook the importance of file names. Read on to learn about how you can implement SEO friendly file names on your web site…

When a web page’s file name is oriented to SEO, it will have a better chance of gaining high rankings in search results – especially if other efforts are made to optimize it. To be SEO friendly, a file name should do each of the following:

1. Contain keywords that people search for (the words must also be relevant to the page’s content)

2. Separate the keywords, preferably with hyphens (-); see the example below.

3. Avoid repeating words in the rest of the URL, like domain or directory names.

This is not really all that difficult to implement. Here are some examples of SEO friendly web page file names:

pascal-programming-books.htm

used-motorcycles-los-angeles.htm

get-better-tv-reception.shtml

charlotte-nc-weather-report.asp

easy-microwave-recipes.php

Hyphens separate the words so that search engines can individually recognize them, rather than seeing them as one long, unintelligible word. Some sites use other punctuation, but hyphens are the most SEO friendly.

If your web site already has dozens or hundreds of pages, it is probably best to start using these file names on new pages, but to leave the existing pages as they are.

On the other hand, if your site only has a few pages, it might be worthwhile to change their file names. However, the old pages ought to be removed and your site should be set to redirect users from the old URLs to the new. Search engines don’t look favorably on duplicate pages, and you also don’t want users who have “bookmarked” the pages not to be able to return.

Putting in a little extra time to make your file names SEO friendly should eventually help increase your search engine based traffic without much difficulty.

It is beneficial to start taking SEO into consideration even while a web site is still under construction and other types of promotion have yet to begin. Here are a few tips on how to begin applying SEO during this process…

1. As soon as possible, complete, optimize, and make available the smallest portion of the site which is useful. For example, upload just the home page and ordering page first, but include a notice that more information is under construction. This way, search engines will find and index the site earlier, but your non-SEO promotional efforts can wait until all construction has been finished. Then you can have a “grand opening” (perhaps using a press release) to show users all that your site has to offer. Keep in mind that it typically takes months after a website is first indexed in Google before it has a chance of gaining high search result positions there.

2. Work on SEO keyword targeting, META tag creation, and search engine “spider” accessibility while the site is under construction, not later. This will save time when you don’t have to rewrite or update pages for SEO in the future. Be sure to incorporate a Site Map into your design. It is also good to learn about proper internet promotional techniques during this process, so you aren’t deceived into applying any detrimental practices like posting to FFA pages or trading links with completely unrelated web sites. Don’t hurry to finish all of the pages immediately or to start promoting the site in any way possible.

3. Don’t submit the incomplete site to directories or try reciprocal linking until it has been finished. Otherwise, the operators of directories or other sites will be less likely to find your site impressive enough to link to, and your chance to be listed will probably be lost. However, it is generally acceptable to send free link submissions to major directories which take months to approve them, as long as the construction process is expected to finish in under a month. Make a list of any directories you submit to, as it can be difficult to remember, and it’s best not to submit to the same directory more than once.

Following these SEO tips will help your site attain higher rankings in search results at an earlier date, with fewer changes needed when it is no longer under construction. This will also prevent mistakes which could undermine the site’s success.

There are lots of different tools online that provide quick data regarding websites, two sites that we use are Quarkbase and Website Grader.  Here is a quick overview of Mortgage101.com using both tools along with some interpretation of the information found by the tools.

If you have a large site with lots of different pages and target links then you should have a sitemap for it. A site map is similar to a table of contents in that it allows people to see an abbreviated version of what’s available on your website.

To create your site map the first step you’ll want to take is laying out all the pages and necessary target links in a word-processing program or on a sheet of paper. During this step you may want to visit some of the websites you are familiar with or like the layout of. Look at their sitemaps for ideas on how to organize your own.

Next, you’ll have to open a text-editing program like Notepad. Using this program open the webpage where your sitemap will be located or create a new page for the sitemap. Copy and paste, or manually enter, the sitemap you created previously into the place you want it on the webpage. Insert the links to each referenced page or target link. Save the page and preview it in a browser, checking to make sure all the links work. Once you’ve verified they all do, upload the page to your website and recheck the links.

Some web design programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver have built-in commands for creating a sitemap. You can check the help section for instructions. If it still seems too difficult to create a sitemap on your own you can purchase products such as Site Map Pro to help create the sitemap you need.

Although it is preferable to avoid this, changing your web site’s URL or domain name is sometimes necessary. This may be due to a particular reason, such as trademark infringement, or just because the current URL doesn’t seem to be effective and you have purchased a better one. Another possibility is that you are upgrading from a page on a free hosting provider with a long URL to a domain name. Regardless of the reason, here are some tips on successfully changing the URL of your web site.

1. As soon as possible, notify users that the URL is changing, using your web site itself and any email lists it has. Try to make the new URL ready to use before the web site disappears from its old location, and put a link on the home page of the web site at the old address. Fewer of your repeat visitors will be lost if you can successfully get them in the habit of using the new address. Don’t change the web site’s design radically during the URL changing process; the combination of the domain name and design change might cause some people to stop using the web site or no longer recognize it.

2. Submit the new website address to search engines and directories as soon as possible so it will quickly appear in search results. This is even important for successfully retaining repeat visitors, as some internet users only access web sites through search engines, never using their browser’s address bar. Don’t have the same content on the old URL’s home page (just have an explanation and a link to the new domain name/URL) during and after this step.

3. Remember to change the URL everywhere that it might be listed or entered. Changing or deleting it from social bookmarking systems, forum user profiles, pay-per-click advertising services, affiliate programs, or article directories may be necessary. If you have reciprocal links with other web sites, request that they change the links on their sites, and notify them of the new address where their links will be moved to.

Following these tips should help your web site in more successfully changing its URL, with the smallest losses of traffic and revenue. Changing your website address is not a task which should be done in a hurry or without giving sufficient consideration to reducing its potentially negative effects.