For an existing company the most obvious choice is to use the company name.  If your existing established removal company is called F Smith and Sons then it makes sense to use it for or as part of the domain name. For example you could use the domain names:

• www.LSmith.co.uk
• www.Lsmith-removals.co.uk
• www.Lsmithandsons-removals.co.uk

I think you would agree that, although the second two names are longer, they do convey more meaning to anyone who sees the name for the first time.

 They are also easy for existing customers to associate with, as they include the company name, which they are already familiar with.

In fact if you look at many existing businesses they already use this principle. How often have you seen shops/businesses with signs like:

• Jones Plumbing Service
• Bill The Gardener
• Jack Jones and Sons Home Deliveries.

Keyword Based Domain Names

Keyword based domain names are basically names constructed from keywords used to describe your product or service. If your business sold computers, then computers would be a keyword.

Keyword based domain names are probably the most common choice for websites, especially for businesses that operate mainly on the Internet.

 The idea behind keyword based names is that when someone does a web search they do a search based on keywords.

These keywords describe what they are looking for. Therefore if they see a site with a domain which contains some or all of those keywords they are more likely to click on the link.

In essence when you look at a keyword based domain name you should know immediately what the company/website is about. For example when you look at these domain names: www.low-fat-diets.com, www.cheap-domain-names.com, www.build-your-website.co.uk.

 You immediately form an impression on the website associated with that domain name.

Domain Names with Dashes and Underscores

Some search engines will give you a higher ranking if you include your keywords in the Website domain name. That apart if your domain name contains keywords then the searcher instantly sees it as relevant and is more likely to select it form the results.

 So a website like this one on building a website would include the keywords building or build, website etc in the domain name. Following this logic here are some alternative domain names for this site.

1. build-your-website
2. build_your_website
3. buildyourwebsite

I choose number 1... build-your-website because all search engines treat the dashes as spaces and see the name as composing of three distinct words-build, your and Website.

However that was 4 years ago. Today I would choose option 3 i.e. do delimiters. All of the main search engines are capable of splitting the name into 3 distinct words without the use of any delimiting characters.

Short or Long Domain Names? Does Size Matter?

There is no doubt that short names tend to be easy to remember. The problem is most short names are already gone. However long domain names aren't really a problem if your main source of traffic is from search engines, newsletters, email etc.

This is because the person never actually types in the domain name, they simply click a link.

If you were running an offline campaign in a newspaper or mail shot and expecting the person to read your website address and then type it into a browser, then the shorter the name the better. Otherwise, I don't see much of a problem with long names.

Having said that, still try to keep them as short as possible while still being meaningful.

 Valid Domain Names

To be valid, a domain name must not be larger than 67 characters including the extension (e.g. .com, .net, .org, etc.). Valid characters are 0-9, a-z and the dash "-". The domain name cannot start or end with a dash and is not case sensitive.

Registering A Domain Name

You will need to register the domain name with the Internet authorities to use it. All hosting companies offer domain name registration and most include a domain name as part of the hosting package.

Therefore don't register the domain name until you have chosen your hosting provider. 

Choosing a Website Hosting Provider

For a service business website you will require:

• A site
• A blog
• An autoresponder

In general, hosting providers provide several service package levels e.g.

• Basic
• Business
• Professional
• Ecommerce (i.e. a shop).

The basic package is all you should need as most include the site hosting and a blog (Wordpress). Now some hosting providers also come with an autoresponder.

However in the main this is simply a single message responder which is not what you need. You need an autoresponder service that can deliver newsletters and courses.

If they have a newsletter tool you may want to try that but my experience is that it is better to go for a professional server like Getresponse or Aweber. (see Autoresponder review).

There are many Website Hosting Providers, here are a few that you may wish to consider.

• Blue Host Web Hosting $6.95 Per Month - USA based Professional website hosting . Incredible feature rich package including Wordpress.
• Anhosting- USA based Professional website hosting for $6.95 per month. Incredible feature rich package  including Wordpress.
• One and one -UK
• Site Build-it- This is a totally different solution as it is a complete website building, hosting, promotion package.

Note1: Site build-it may appear at first glance to be expensive in comparison to the others. It is however a complete package complete with newsletter tool which is adequate for most needs.

 It is the solution I would recommend to those who are not so technical and wish to concentrate on their business and not website building.

 However if you are a UK service business Sitesell doesn't offer a .uk domain name and is hosted in Canada. This means that you may not rank so highly in the UK search results as a UK domain name with hosting in the UK.

Therefore, even though I'm a big SBI fan I would recommend that if your market is UK based then you should chose a UK hosting provider ( a .com domain name is OK though).

Another Option I would recommend is using Wordpress. It is a much cheaper and more flexible option than SBI but it does require that you are a little more technically savvy ( but not much). See Build a Website with Wordpress.

Note2: One and one UK is the provider for this site is German based but is treated as if it it were UK based (it probably uses UK IP addresses).

In Part 5 we will be looking at Building the site