If you are starting a new business, chances are that you are starting a new website as well. As a tech-savvy person, you realize how important creating the image of your company and your brand online is, as the Internet is the way that most businesses thrive (or, alternately, fail) in this day and age.

In addition to making sure that the design and web-tools on your new site are effective and easy to use, you also need to consider what your website is going to be called and how people are going to be able to find it online. This name for your website is referred to as a “domain name”.

Domain names are the part of your web address that comes between the “www.” and the suffix that you choose, be it “.com”, “.biz”, “.org”, etcetera. This is how people are going to remember your website, and come back to it time and time again.

If you choose the wrong one, you may end up shooting yourself (or your company) in the foot, as you will not be able to effectively attract new customers and clients to your website.

But what makes finding the perfect domain name difficult these days is the fact that all of the very simple ones are taken. If you have a used car dealership in Akron, Ohio, you are never going to be able to register a name like “cars.com”, or “usedcars.com”, because names like this will either all be taken, or will be extremely expensive to buy. Instead, you must think of something more innovative.

If the name of your car dealership is short and easy to spell, then this would be a great domain to register. But if your dealership is named Kowalcyk´s Lot or Nguyen Cars, you might not be able to count on the public to find your website if it uses those hard-to-spell names.

So what is the solution in a situation like this? Often, the best thing to do is find a simple combination of words that will stick in the public´s consciousness, and be easy to spell. Try something like akroncars.com, yournewcar.com, or buyusednow.com.

Depending on how basic the combination is, the domain name might have already been purchased by someone who is “sitting” on it, trying to sell it to prospective buyers. Try to avoid this situation if you can. For example, buyused.com might go for a high price, while you can purchase buyusednow.com at a more reasonable rate.

The one temptation that you want to stay away from is choosing a suffix other than “.com”. The majority of the Internet-using public will assume that any website name ends in this most basic suffix, even if they are told and constantly reminded otherwise.

You do not want to lose traffic because everyone assumes that your website is usedcars.com, when it is really usedcars.org.

The final pitfall you want to avoid is altering a spelling in a way that might confuse people who want to come to your website.

If you go with usedcarz.com, with a “z” instead of an “s”, this might be passable, if you mention it in your ads repeatedly, making sure that it is driven into people´s heads that there is a z at the end of the website name.

But it is best to avoid such a situation all together and choose something that is commonly spelled.

About the Author: Henry Cook - Find out what domain names are still available and act now before they are gone. Check out networksolutions.com for more info.

original article from entireweb.com newsletter

Are you looking for a web designer to get your website design projects done? Hiring a web designer is a crucial decision and there are a number of factors that should be considered while choosing a web designer for your website design projects.

Experience

One should find out how long their website developer or website agency has been in business and what type of projects they have worked on. There are many models for websites, and often someone whose past experience with a similar client type will be an advantage to you.

Past experiences with similar business types should lead to quicker discovery because that website designer knows what options there are and what questions to ask. Also, make sure that your developer is working with modern technologies and best industry practices, no matter if they know your business model or not.

Modern practices lead to better search engine results and good usability across multiple browser types and operating systems.

Development Skillset

Although this may be harder to hone in on, ask your website developer or website agency about their skill set and attention to best and industry standards. Ask if they are using most modern HTML coding, high quality CSS for best cross browser compatibility, smart basic search engine optimization practices, and a site that is foundational in that you can add more pages or content down the line. You may want to ask how far their technical strengths are in custom programming, ecommerce, content management system development, or other skills if you know you may need them.

If you want to sell products online, you will need a website developer who has a lot of experience in ecommerce design and development. Often, as a company uses the web more and more, business owners find they need more than one person do handle all skill sets needed for a particular website project.

Website Portfolio

A website company’s work will most often speak for itself. Decide if you like their website design portfolio.

A design portfolio will show you what styles a website company can deliver and what type of features to expect in their page designs. When you look at a website design portfolio, you can form questions about those designs that may lead to a better design for you. If you see something you really like one of the website designer or website agency designs, you can point out what you like about it, what you want, and what you do not want.

Client References

Ask for your website designer’s client references. Who better to talk to than current and past clients? One should not feel strange about asking for this.

A website is often not a small investment and one should be sure he or she knows what the website developer’s customers are saying. You may want to talk to client’s who have similar projects to yours.

Strategy

A website project requires proper preparation, attention to detail, collaboration, and more. Organization becomes as important as any of these items.

You will want a website designer who can effectively communicate with you and your personnel, from project start to project completion. If you need a hand holder, hire a hand holder. If you want someone who will come in for planning meetings once a week as part of the project, hire someone who can commit to that.

A website developer needs to have organizational tools in place to keep the project on time and can get all involved to meet deadlines in order to meet time goals. Ask your website developer how a project process will go and see that you can agree to meeting times and other requirements for good outcome.

Availability

If you know when you need your website to go live, make sure your website developer will be able to make him or herself available to meet your deadline. If they have many projects at once, make sure they will make your project as important and will meet your time requirements.

Flexibility

On the other hand, if you require a designer who can be more flexible and accommodate you when you can make time, see that this can be done. If you know you want many designs or may change your mind in the middle of the project as to what direction you want to go, make sure you developer knows this and can work with you.

Developers may require more or less money depending on the flexibility you need. If you need the flexibility, however, the change in price may be an easier decision that if you did not.

Location

Website designers have the luxury and flexibility to work wherever they have a computer with their website design software tools and utilities. Some designers are less flexible in that they require the ability to work from home or from an office that is provided for them.

A website client must determine what type of communication is required, especially when considering websites will need updates. Your website designer will probably be someone you will work with for quite a while if all goes well.

If your business is in Los Angeles, California for example, and you require someone to visit your office once a month, you should probably hire a website designer who lives in Los Angeles or nearby.

Education

Many website designers teach themselves or take specific courses in school to be able to do what they can do. A degree is not a requirement, as nothing speaks for itself like a good website design portfolio, but a degree in a related field does add credibility.

Degrees in Marketing, Graphic Design, Business (with emphasis in e-business), Communication, Programming, Sociology, and Psychology are additional assets. Often, when an agency is hired, they will have people with various degrees. Many eyes on your projects from diverse backgrounds may help better user experiences for all personality types.

Personality

Do you like your web designer’s attitude, their tone, and the way they dress and present themselves when in your company? Make sure you feel comfortable with the website designer you choose because you will most likely work with this person for a long time.

Websites need updates and website trends change. You will want a website developer who will communicate with you about all of the things you can or should be doing with your website. Again, do you like the people you are about to hire?

About the Author: David Ephraim from a Los Angeles Web Design company, cracks the essential 10 characteristics to look for while choosing a web designer for your website design projects.
original article from entireweb.com newsletter

Just to cover the ground, lets go over what link building is quickly. Link building is the process of building backlinks to your site. More backlinks (link form other sites to your site) a site has, higher it ranks on the search engines. Link building therefore is a mission of all money making webmasters.

Link building methods have changed form time to time and a specific method that worked yesterday may not work today anymore. This is due to changes in the industry over time and in some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.

It is therefore very important to know which link building method works today so that you can spend your time in a most productive way.

There are many link building methods out there today that work with some working better than others. Below are some of the today’s popular links building methods that work to some extent:

Article Submission

If you are reading this article, then you know that you can publish your own article in article directories. Not only do you gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus. Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading your published articles as well.

Article submission is a great way of building backlinks as it provides you with 100% relevant contextual backlinks that Google loves.

Directory Submission

Directory submission used to work lot better before but it is still a popular link building method that still works if done properly. How many directories are out there as of this date is anyone’s guess but one thing is certain: that most of the directories aren’t worth submitting to.

Google considers a Yahoo Directory link as a quality backlink so if you can afford and justify the cost, it is worth submitting to Yahoo Directory. Yahoo charges $300 for a yearly submission and there is no guarantee that your site will be approved!

DMOZ is another directory that is worth submitting to and can come to great benefit in your SEO campaign. It may take months to get the approval form DMOZ and the chance of getting approved is pretty slim. Lot of small directories use DMOZ directory categories so getting listed with DMOZ would mean getting bonus listing on many other web directories.

Another good directory to submit to would be BOTW directory that cost $99 for a yearly submission and $299 for a permanent listing.

Other than the above ones, you should look for quality directories where you can submit your site. You can judge the quality of the directories by analyzing the number of sites listed, number of backlinks the directory has, PR, age of the directory, etc.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking worked like charm only a few months ago. If bookmarked on authority and quality bookmarking site like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc, then you can still make good use of social bookmarking. Other than backlinks, social bookmarking also offers you some bonus traffic depending on where you submit to. If you can manage to put together or collect a good bookmarking site list, then social bookmarking can still be a useful link building method.

Blog Commenting

This is a link building method where lots of spamming have already been done so to make the best of it, you need to work a little harder here. It is best to find quality blogs related to your own category and make on-topic relevant comments. Not only do your comments add value to the blogpost, you now have a greater chance of getting your comment approved and your comments have greater chance of staying on those blogposts.

Press Releases

Submitting to press release sites can get you some backlinks as well. It is however hard to put together a list of good press release sites that’s worth submitting to. If a good list can be managed, then this method can offer some quality relevant backlinks as well.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Pages

There are a lot of quality social media and Web 2.0 sites where you can publish your articles for backlinks. You should write articles that are relevant to your site and publish them on these social media and Web 2.0 sites with your keywords hyperlinked to your own site. Some of the authority sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc.

Social media and Web 2.0 links are very popular these days as they work great. They offer quality relevant contextual backlinks that Google and other major search engines love. There are lots of other link building methods out there but if you can utilize the above ones to their fullest potential, there is no need for any other methods.

About the Author: For more information on Link Building and to learn on outsourcing your link building campaign, visit the author’s Link Building Service site.
original article from entireweb.com newsletter