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ULTIMATE DOMAIN BUYING GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS 

Written by Mika Lee

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to make an informed decision about buying a domain name for your website, DomainRacer is one of the best companies, and by using this you can buy the best domain for your website in an affordable form. Even though cost is certainly a thought, picking the best domain name registration is somewhat more confounded than searching for the least expensive choice. Plus some basic rules you need to keep in mind and lots of other helpful tips. First, let’s start with some of the terms that are commonly used when talking about domains.

What is a Domain Name?

The domain name is a unique name that is used to identify an Internet resource such as a web page. Or simply explained, this is the text that you put into your web browser to go to a web page. Your business needs a domain name so your customers can find and interact with you online. Some examples of domain names are google.com, aol.com, bbs.co.uk, etc. A domain name can only have characters, numbers, and hyphens in it.

What is TLD

TLD is an acronym for Top Level Domain. For example .com for commercial companies, .gov for the United States government, etc. Ultimately, the best answer to how to get a free domain for free becomes a valuable asset, contributing significantly to a website’s success and online presence. You can find many TLDs available from big registrars like DomainRacer. This is a complete list of all available TLDs and is updated by IANA from time to time, but it is the most accurate of all. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Vyny-P86c

What is a Domain Registrar?

A domain name registrar is an organization or business entity that manages the reservation of web domain names. DomainRacer domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry and/or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. (taken from Wikipedia). Registrars are the ones you go to to buy your domain. It is very important to use a reliable company where you can buy your domains since they are the most valuable digital resources.

This is a list of trusted domain name registrars:

  • http://www.domainracer.com/
  • https://www.namesilo.com
  • https://domains.google.com/
  • https://www.namecheap.com/
  • http://internetbs.net/
  • https://www.dynadot.com/
  • http://www.enom.com/

ADVICE

Select the DomainRacer registrar that works best for you in terms of price and support and buy all your domains with them for easy management. Ideally, the registrar you select:

  • You will not have hidden charges
  • Will offer email with free whois privacy and data protection to avoid being bombarded with spam
  • It will give you direct access to your whois records (so you know the domain is in your name), access to your domain authentication code, lockout, and full registrar control over your DNS settings

What is EMD?

EMD is an acronym for Exact Domain Match in English, which means Exact Domain Match in Spanish. It is a term used in SEO that means that your domain exactly matches the search phrase. For example, if someone searches for the term “best pizza” and you own www.mejorpizza.com or mejorpizza.net; etc, this is an exact match of the domain.

What is PMD?

PMD is “Partial March Domain” which means Partial Domain Matching. If we use the previous example, someone can search for the term mejor pizza and if you own mejor-pizza.com, pepepizza.net; etc, this is a partial domain match.

Domain Name Selection Brainstorming and Best Practices

Getting the right DomainRacer domain name for your business is essential because this is how your customers will associate with you online and it will determine how successful your online marketing effort will be. Until recently it was difficult to find a good domain, since most of them with TLD .com had already been taken, or at least the best ones. But from 2022 and very soon in 2023, there will be more than 1000 TLDs available that you can choose from to get a catchy and memorable domain name that best suits your business.

There are TLD lines .bike .restaurant .attorney, etc. You can head over to DomainRacer to play around with the TLDs. If you want to know which ones are available to buy now, click on the Available Now tab.

Start the Brainstorming

Here are some questions to help you! – Does your company already have a name? What does your company do? Who are your customers? What kind of industry do you work in?

Write down the answers and think as much as you can about it. You can also ask friends and family for help. They can give you good ideas. To sum it all up in a shortlist and find the top 5 keywords that best describe your business.

ADVICE

You can go to http://www.pickydomains.com/ or Fiverr to ask a professional what would be the best name for your business or domain name. Sure you will get good ideas at a cheap price.

Advice on Choosing the Right Domain Name

Characters you can use

As we said at the beginning, only characters, numbers, and hyphens are allowed for domain names. A-Z 0-9 and –

Make Sure It’s Simple and Memorable.

Try words that can only have one possible spelling. The shorter the domain name, the better, as it will be easier to remember and type, try to keep it to 5-12 characters maximum and only if they are significant words.

Try To Avoid Hyphens

Hyphens are horrible for word-of-mouth marketing simply because domains get harder to spell. Try telling your friends that you found joesfloridapizza.com and joes-florida-pizza.com. Now can you see the difference? Not to mention that you will lose a lot of traffic compared to domains without hyphens since hyphenated pages are harder to remember. Not good for your marketing, especially with those 1000+ TLDs that will be ready by next year.

Use Keywords From Your Industry in the Domain Name or TLD

Since Google’s EMD was updated in 2012, exact match domains are not very robust, but having your main keyword in the domain helps your SEO, especially in niches with low competition. DomainRacer can also increase your click-through rate in search results since elmecanicojoe.com cannot be a veterinary website. Talk about your business and the first impression someone gets when they see the URL in the results.

ADVICE

You can use the new TLDs to increase your SEO. For example, if you have 50 links with the same link text pointing to your domain with your keywords; Let’s say: best pizza NYC, there is a high chance of being penalized. But if you get the domain best pizza.nyc and put that in the link text, this would be the domain URL and your trademark name. So both get recognition in the link text, your links, and keywords.

Make the Link Attractive

Links are the most important part of your SEO efforts, and you need your domain to look good to other webmasters and bloggers. This has to provide confidence and be attractive. Think Would you link or open a link to the domain you want to select? For example, recetasdeana.com looks much better than mejores100-recetas-delmundo.com. 

It’s free and Ajax-powered so it saves you a LOT of time and you can test the domain suggestions without refreshing the page. Or you can head over to DomainRacer and experiment with the new TLDs. Ok, now that you have those tips and your top 5 keywords, head over to my favorite domain name verification tool – https://domaintyper.com/. 

Avoid copyright and trademark issues

You don’t want to register a domain like dellengland.com so that when it becomes popular and starts making money, Dell’s lawyers will take it off your hands.

You would likely lose the right to register your domain name if there are lawyers involved in the following cases:

  • You have intentionally chosen a name that is similar to another company’s domain name or trademark to create customer confusion
  • You do not carry out the practice that the name of the company indicates
  • Neither you nor any other individual in your company has a name that is the same or similar
  • You are planning to sell that domain name to your competitor for financial gain
  • For more information on the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy – http://www.icann.org/dndr/udrp/policy.htm

Buying the Domain

Now that you have a DomainRacer domain name that is available for purchase, you need to purchase it. Every registrar has different prices for different TLDs and if they have a very cheap .com domain, their .at or .net could be overpriced. That is why you should try to go to the nearest source. If you have selected a .com domain any of the big registrars will offer you almost the same price. If you’re trying to register a .es domain, you might find better deals with a company in Spain like DomainRacer and if you’re looking for a .at domain, search Google and you’ll find the best deal at NIC.at.

ADVICE

Try searching Google for a domain and the TLD you have chosen plus the word coupon, for example – .com DomainRacer coupon.

Be on the lookout for offers for services you don’t need. Especially with DomainRacer which tends to do that. You buy a domain and at checkout, they give you hundreds of paid options that you don’t need. When you buy a domain name, you can add a variety of extra features: whois privacy protection, SSL certificates, etc. These extra services can be very expensive. Beware of special offers – or avoid the temptation to bundle things you don’t need.

Check if the Domain Name is Clean.

The last step before buying the domain you have found would be to check that it is not linked to bad links or is blacklisted. This is not to say that once you find a good, attractive domain name that’s perfect for your business, you can’t buy it right away. 

Then, when you have your web page, you can ask Google for reconsideration. But that means someone has already built a bad reputation for that domain and your online marketing effort will take much longer to take effect.

How to check if a domain name has already been used? These are two very effective tools – https://archive.org/web/ and http://whois.domaintools.com. At Archive.org you just type in the domain name and it will show you if there are any entries in your time machine if the domain has already been used. Then go to DomainRacer’s Domaintools and in the top right corner type the domain you want to check. 

This will show you the records available in its database of when the domain was first registered, how many owners it had, and if it was abandoned before that. Now, if these two tools show that it hasn’t been registered before – congratulations, go to your DomainRacer registrar and buy it If the domain has history, first go to Google and type the domain name in the search field exactly as it is spelled, and if it shows up as the first result, that’s good. 

If not, there is a high chance that the domain is penalized by Google, so if you don’t want to give yourself a headache with your SEO, look for another domain name, there are unlimited possibilities to create it.

About the author

Mika Lee

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