Your domain name can be a key factor in your online business success. It is the name of your website – it is how people find you on the web. Anytime you type into the address bar of your browser, you are using a domain name. For example, when you type http://www.wiseweblady.com/ into your browser, you are typing in the domain name for my Wise Web Lady website.

Be sure your domain name is an accurate reflection of your business. It should be something that people will remember or recognize as you. A potential customer or a business associate may not remember your email or phone number, and a good domain name make its easy for them to visit your website and find you. So try to keep your domain name simple and easy to remember.

When you’re ready to get a domain name for your website, you must first search to see if the domain name you choose is available for “purchase”. Now, I put “purchase” in quotation marks because in actuality you are not really purchasing your domain name, you are claiming it, or reserving it, for your use for the time you have registered it for.

You can search for a domain and purchase it at any domain registrar. Examples of domain registrar sites are goDaddy.com, eNom.com, and NetworkSolutions.com. Which domain registrar you use is up to you, as they vary in price and ease of use. Or if you have a webmaster, they can typically handle registering your domain for you.

Purchase your domain name for more than one year. When it comes to search engines, age matters. And the longer you reserve your domain, the better it is for search engines. If you purchase your domain for 3 or 5 or even 10 years, the search engines view your website as a more established business and will give it more weight and higher ranking in search results.

Keep your domain registrar login information in a safe place. Be sure you keep track of who your domain registrar is and be sure you have your login and access information stored in a safe place where you can find it. You need this information each time to renew your domain or if you need to move your website. If you do not know your domain login information, ask your webmaster to get it for you so you have it on file.

Be sure you renew your domain on time. If you do not remember to renew your domain before it expires, you run the risk of losing it and giving someone else the chance of purchasing it away from you. Talk about identity theft! Forgetting to renew your domain is like leaving your storefront unlocked, you’re just inviting someone to steal it away from you.

Most domain registrars will email you to let you know that your domain is expiring, so be sure you keep your contact info and email address up-to-date with your domain registrar so you will get their notifications. And, as an added precaution, you might add a reminder in your Outlook calendar to remind you a few weeks before your domain expires so you remember to renew it on time.

Verify your domain registration information is correct. Be sure your domain has been propertoy registered in your name. You can check this by going to http://www.whois.org/ and typing in your domain name. Be sure your name and contact information shows under the Registrant portion of the domain. If you have a webmaster who setup your domain for you, their name should show as the technical contact. But be sure your name is showing as the actual registrant for it. So, in case you have a falling out with your webmaster or need to move your site yourself, you want to be sure you have the information you need to take control of the situation and take control of your website domain if needed.

Here’s to Your Online Success!

Betty Walker, the Wise Web Lady
http://www.wiseweblady.com
http://www.ccstechpros.com
bettywalker@wiseweblady.com

Do I need a robots.txt file for my site?

When search engines make a crawl through your website, one of the first things they look for is a robots.txt file – you can think of it as a welcome file to the search engines for your site. It tells them If there are certain files or folders that you don’t want indexed. And, it can direct them to your sitemap file, which gives them a roadmap to the files on your site that you do want to be indexed.

Your robots.txt is a simple text file that you place in the root of your site and is created using your favorite html editor. If your domain is yourbusinesssite.com, then the search engines will look for yourbusinesssite.com/robots.txt.

A sample robots.txt file would look like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yourbusinessite.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Here’s a quick overview of each of these:

1. Sitemap – The sitemap entry helps the search engines find your sitemap file, which in turn helps the search engines indexed more of your website pages that they might find on their own. You can learn more about sitemaps by visiting here.

Although this Sitemap entry is independent from the other statements in your robots.txt file, I typically place this at the top of my file for organization and consistency.

2. User-agent – The user-agent refers to the search engine spiders. By using the * wildcard, we are saying that this entry refers to all search engine spiders and robots. 

3. Disallow – The Disallow statement tells the search engines if there are any portions of your site that they should not index.  In our case, by having no file or directory listed on this statement tells the search engines it’s okay to index our entire site.

Even though we do not have any restrictions to report to the search engine crawlers, just having the robots file present will prevent unecessary errors from showing in your web statistics bad referral report.

The robots.txt file can be used to pass on specific instructions to each search engine.  For example, if you wanted to block Google from searching your site entirely, you can use the following syntax:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

One word of caution: Although it can be common practice to use your robots.txt file to disallow certain folders or directories from being indexed, you should keep in mind that anyone can access your robots file, and spammers sometime make it a point to check the robots.txt for excluded directories to spider.

So, in summary, you can use your Robots.txt file to let them know what you would like excluded and to point them to your sitemap file.  All this can be important steps in helping improve your search engine placement.

That’s it for now, talk soon!

Betty Walker, Founder & CEO
CyberCompany Solutions, Inc.
http://www.ccstechpros.com
bawalker@ccs-email.com