The Make Your Own Website Blog

I recommend that whenever possible you use keywords in your domain name. However it isn’t a hard and fast rule. I have a website that uses my company name and many of you will as well.

The reason for using keywords in the domain name is that when someone sees it he/she as an idea of what the site is about. In addition it also helps in your search engine rankings, but only marginally. 

Some people in an effort to follow this rule create incredibly long domain names like:

keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.com

Other than being very difficult to remember and even more difficult to type they look very unprofessional. Therefore I would recommend that you limit your name to 2 and max three keywords.

If you can’t then go for a shorter but more generic name.

Rember your domain name is important and you should choose carefully.

Site build it are having a Valetines Special. So if you were thinking of building a website using sbi now you can build one and get a second one for $100.

So you have an idea for your new domain name so you go to a domain name registrar and use their free domain name availability tool to check to see if it’s available. Simple enough.. except if you use the tool on the Network Solutions website.

Once you check it with their tool Network solutions reserves it for 4 days. So if you find that it is available but then look for a cheaper registrar like Nameboy, and go to register it, you will find it already registered to Network solutions, and the only way to buy is through them (expensive) or wait 4 days until they release it.

When I first read about it on a sitesell forum I couldn’t believe it so I tested it. Here are three screen shots showing a search for the domain name make-dosh.com.

First on nameboy and its free.

Then on Network Solutions and its free.

Nameboy again and its already taken. (note the time difference between it being free and then registered)

Network solutions do warn you and tell you it’s for your own good.

However I’m inclined to think differently and will be giving their domain name availablity checker a miss in the future.

Therea a post at Techcrunch by Michael Arrington with plenty of comments if you want to read more.

Being more of a techie than an artist I’ve tended to concentrate on the technical aspects of website building. However recently I decided to enlist the help of a designer and get a quick site  makeover, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Continued in The Importance of website Design

1and 1 are celebrating their 20th anniversary and are offering 50% off all their hosting packages. Don’t forget to choose the most appropriate location for your host as discussed previously in how host location affects your website.

• One and one Uk
• 1&1 USA
  

Most Webmasters spend their time trying to get their web pages into the search engine index as quickly as possible.

So why would you want to keep your web pages out of the index?

There are in fact some good reasons why you would want to hide some of your website from the search engine spiders. Among them:

• The content is private
• It is duplicate (Wordpress produces multiple URLs for the same content).
• You don’t want it to leak page rank. (contact us , privacy policy pages etc)
• It is not worth being indexed

So how do you do it… Find out in the Hiding from spiders article.

In late November last year I moved my site niche-website-guide.com from 1and1 UK to Bluehost. The main reason for doing this was to see what difference it made to the search engines.

Over the last few years Yahoo in particular seems to give completely different results when searching the USA Yahoo (yahoo.com) and the UK Yahoo (yahoo.co.uk). The site was doing well in Yahoo UK and Google but not so well in Yahoo USA.

I wanted to see if simply moving it to a USA host would reverse the results. I would expect it to, which is why I recommend that USA based businesses use a USA based host and vice-versa. However I  would still like confirmation. The results will take time to come through as the search engines adjust to the new location.

You can read how I did it it in Moving Host and Domain Name Registrars

Site build it are having a 2 for1 Xmas special. So if you were thinking of building a website using sbi now you can build 2.

This blog uses Wordpress. Wordpress was originally designed for blogging but it is becoming more  common to see it being used to host standard websites.

I have recently moved two of my sites (Building niche websites and Steves Internet Guide) over to Wordpress and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.. continued in  Build a Website with Wordpress

Birth of a website Video

Templates are the starting point of any website but what type of template do you choose?
I’ve just put a new video online at website templates which explains the difference between HTMl and PHP templates and which one to use an when.
I’d be more than happy to hear your comments and maybe suggestions.