Domain Names

Introduction:

Domain names are host names used for numeric IP addresses. These host names must starts with letter or digits and ends with number or letter and the intermediate character can be digits, letters or hyphens. These host names must be between 1 and 63 characters long and are case sensitive. The domain name cannot contain all digits, however may contain underscores.

Interestingly, more than one IP address may be assigned to a domain name and more than one domain name can be assigned to one IP address. For example one server may host many websites and a surfer through HTTP specifies which web site he or she is going to use. This feature is known as virtual hosting and used by web hosts.

Uniform Resource Locator or URL address and domain names are different.  For example the URL address is http://www.lmp.com, whereas the domain name is lmp.com.

How to select a name:

Selecting a domain name is an important task and you should select a short, simple, descriptive, memorable to viewers and customers and should be relevant to your type of business. Every country has reserved two-letter country code for example the country code of US is .us and if your specific product were for UK, or US you would like to choose the domain localized for your target market. The benefits of selecting these localized domains may give you advantage on local search engines as some of the local search engine may display the local country code domains only.

Although the selection of a good domain name is more complex but it should be

Short,

Memorable,

Relevant for your business and

Hard to misspell

Top Level Domain (TLD):

Every domain name end with a top-level domain name which is always a very small name selected from a generic name or territory or country code. In domain name lmp.com, .com is top-level domain. Some of the generic to level domain includes .com, .biz, .gov, .info, .int, .net, .org. Some of the country code top-level domain includes .us, .uk, in, .nz, .au etc.

He names directly to the left of the top-level domain are called as second level domain. For example in lmp.com, lmp is second level domain.

SEO consideration in selecting domain name:

Selecting a domain name which can help in SEO include the use of suitable keyword in URL. Although, search engine optimization is a long task and requires various skill and techniques in addition to keyword alone, however the use of suitable keyword in URL makes the process somewhat easy. If your URL contains more than one keyword, it can be beneficial for you, but at the same time the search engine may consider the both keywords as one and in those cases, use of a hyphen to separate the keywords is recommended.

You can make the process easy by registering hyphen containing domain name with search engines and go for a domain name with no hyphen, so the people do not confuse with hyphens and easily remember the domain name.

Domain name registration process:

ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a non-profit corporation based at California was created in 1998 to oversee the number of Internet related tasks. The task includes managing and assigning domain names, IP addresses and introduction of new generic top-level domains.

Domain name registrars, on behalf of ICANN sell Internet domain names. ICANN have authority ov over three g-TLD i.e. .com, .net, .org. Domain name registrars can sell domain names containing these three TLD. There are several registrars and they compete with each other and provide best support and services at lowest prices.