Starter Guide To Setting Up A Website

A starter guide answering three fundamental questions that aspiring website owners have:

How to choose a good domain name for marketing and branding purposes, How to select a good webhost and How to plan and build their site.

The guide is compiled based on recommendations made by some of the top internet marketers as well as from my own experience.

Part 1: How to choose a good Domain Name for Branding and Marketing
First, consider if the domain name registrar is an ICANN accredited registrar or a
reseller of domain names. Usually, an ICANN accredited registrar is able to offer
domain names at cheaper prices.
I register all my domain names with http://www.godaddy.com . The registration
services here are one of the cheapest that you can ever find. You then type in the
domain name that you are considering and see if the name is still available.
A good domain name is one when you also consider branding and marketing factors.
Here are 8 hot tips when it comes to a good domain name strategy:
1. Easy to remember. It will be even better if you can choose a domain name that is
catchy. A domain name that is easy to remember adds value to your marketing.
2. Make it Relevant. To go about this, brainstorm on the keywords for the business
that you wish to be in. You can use http://www.wordtracker.com and sign up for a
trial account to get a list of related keywords. Or go to http://inventory.overture.com
for keyword suggestions.
3. Consider Word Combinations. If you find that most of the short domain names
have already been taken, you can always register word combinations. Godaddy.com
provides you with some word combination suggestions as well.
4. Do not use hyphens for primary sites, the ones that are dedicated to sell. The
rationale is this: the first natural instinct of anyone trying to remember your website
address is to type in a name without hyphens.
A lot of people register hyphenated domain names for Search Engine Optimisation
reasons. They do so by having the keywords in the hyphenated domain names.
The best strategy is to get both the hyphenated and the non-hyphenated one.
If you use a name that’s hyphenated and you don’t own the non-hyphenated one, you
are going to send traffic to whoever who has the non-hyphenated version.
5. Register domain names for offline marketing purposes. If you do any offline
advertising, you must use a separate domain for each affiliate product or business that
you are promoting.
When you become an affiliate of an online merchant, you get a commission for
referring sales and/or leads. As an affiliate, you get a link coded with your ID to
promote.) Your affiliate link can look something like this
http://www.proanalyzer.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi/limevelyn
The link does not look too professional. If you promote this offline, don’t expect
people to type in the entire link.
Starter Guide to setting up a Website --- Three Fundamental Questions Answered!
© Evelyn Lim Page 4 of 10
You can consider registering a new domain and then do a domain forward to the
affiliate site. Forwarding a domain name enables you to direct incoming traffic from
your parked domain to an already existing website. Thus, when someone attempts to
access your domain, he or she is automatically redirected. A parked domain is a
domain name with domain name servers (DNS) set to parked.
Example: Domain forward and Masking to an Affiliate Site
Suppose you register a new domain name (seconddomainname.com ) for your
affiliate website at http://www.affiliatewebsite.com/cgi-bin/youraffiliateid.
Access your godaddy.com account and click “Manage domain forwarding”.
Select the domain name that you wish to forward (seconddomainname.com) and
type in the destination address (http://www.affiliatewebsite.com/cgibin/
youraffiliateid).
Next, you want to consider forwarding with masking. Check on the masking
option when you are shown the box for domain forwarding. Forwarding with
masking prevents visitors from knowing that they have been redirected by
securing that your domain name remains in the visitor's browser's address bar
when he/she is being redirected, thus concealing the actual destination address.
The forwarding with masking option further enables you to add a title, plus
description and keywords meta tag data to the masked site. Title and meta tag
information is important to a Web site’s search engine ranking, but does not
influence how a Web site is being displayed.
Example: Domain forward to a Webpage that you host
Note that the above method of forwarding your domain name directly to an
affiliate website that you are promoting may not allow you to capture your ...