Domain Name Registration

One of the first things you have to do in order to properly start a website is register a domain name. For those who don't know, a website's domain name is what you type in to direct your browser to a specific website. For example: www.homebusinessendeavors.com is this website's domain name. This is also known as a URL.

Step 1 - Research
Before you register your domain name, you're going to need to figure out what you want your domain name to be. A good way to get traffic to your site is to use a domain name that is descriptive of your site. Take a little time to do some research to see what keywords people are searching for online in your field. Start by checking out Wordtracker. They have an excellent keyword suggestion tool as well as many other great features. The full version isn't very expensive, but they also have a slimmed down free version to get started with.

Step 2 - Registration
Once you have your keywords, go to one of the domain name registration sites to see if any combination of them is available. Searching for an available domain name is free at any legitimate website.

There are many places on the internet that you can go to to register a domain name. A lot of web hosts and other companies give you a domain name as part of their startup package. Make sure that they are giving you your own URL (examle: www.yoursite.com), not an add on to their URL (example: www.theirsite.com/yoursite), to ensure that your website looks professional to any web user. Any good domain name registration site will give you step-by-step instructions to follow to get set up. It's very easy when done right. Here are the top websites that I recommend for this:

1. Go Daddy
Go Daddy is one of the world's biggest domain name registries. They have good prices and a good tool for suggesting domain names incase the one you want is already taken.

2. Network Solutions
Network Solutions has been in business for 25 years. They pioneered domain name registration and today continue as a leader in web presence services. They also offer many other products and services to help their customers drive traffic to their web sites.

3. Hostica.com
hostica.com has an inexpensive domain name registration service as well as many other web hosting services. You can use them for most of your website set up needs.

4. 000 Domains
000domains.com is a little more expensive, but they also have a very good service and can also help you with web hosting and some other services.

Note #1: when registering your domain name, do your best to get a .com extension. Other extensions work perfectly well, but most web users are accustomed to using .com. If you use another extension, they may not find your site when they have to type your URL in manually.

Note #2: If the domain name you wanted was unavailable to you when you tried to register, check again using deleteddomains.com. They have a complete listing of every domain name that is taken out of use every day. It's a great service.