Someone asked about all the ins and outs of buying a domain name.  Here are some of my answers to their questions.

Registrar, Registry, Registrant?

Registrant is the person who ‘owns’ the domain name.  Example: Chris Wood is the registrant of the the domain name, “HANDSOMEWEB.COM.”  Registrar is the company that registers the domain name.  The registrar sells a domain name registrations to the public.  If you want to register a domain name go to a place like  Handsome Web Services.  A registry is where all the domain registration information for a top level domain (like .com or .org or .cn) is managed.  Registrars purchase domains to sell to you from the registries.  Verisign maintains the registry for .com and .net, but you can’t register a name at Verisign, only a registrar can get a name from Verisign.  Some registries do sell domains.

Are all registrars the same, and does it matter where I buy it?

No, registrars are not all the same, but most are.  There have been instances where registrars went bankrupt, but other regsitrars were anxious to take over the domains.  It is difficult to start up a domain registrar business in your basement (although this is easy for a hosting business).

Do I have to use my real contact information?

Yes, or you may have trouble.  You must verify your contact information with your registrar annually, so you don’t want to miss their notice.  But, you don’t have to use your personal email address.  I use ‘noreply @ handsomeweb . com’ as my email address and filter that email into a specific folder.  And yes the email address in your domain registration will be SPAMMED.

Should I buy ‘Private Registrations?’

Privacy with your registrations (like is sold at HandsomeWebServices.com) is a service provided so you don’t have to attach your own email address in the public registry.  Convenient if you are registering only a few domain names.  Be sure you keep up with the information you get when buying privacy.

Should I let someone else register my domain name for me?

NO, not even me. I do for several clients, but I recommend you always manage your on domain and take the time to understand how to change and transfer it.  If someone registers your domain name, you will have big problems getting control of it (It may be impossible.) if you ever have a dispute with that person or if that person is hit by a bus and moves on.

There are a lot of companies that sell websites and register your domain name for you and provide hosting for you.  Some make it nearly impossible to quit their service because they control your domain name.  And when they do tell you how to transfer your domain name, they close your website.  So, your website is down for several days.

Where do you recommend I buy domain name registrations?

Handsome Web Services, of course.

Well, we are an Arlington Texas Web Design Company again.  Web design is taxable in the state of Texas, so this is a little bad news for our Texas clients.  Expect to see that 8% tax (part of which is helping to build this).

We look to be collecting a good bit with three site launches before September.

If you are paying close attention, that is an ‘Optimizing’ link.  Also note that blog.handsomeweb.com is a different site than www.handsomeweb.com in official Internet protocols.  Google is probably able to tell if they were in the same machine or IP space, but I have them in different datacenters, so it counts and an incoming external link.  This is good.  Now go find Catholic churches in the Bronx.

I launched a new site today: AdvancedFreight.net.  Advanced Freight Service of Fayetteville, Arkansas wanted to let their potential customers know about their ability to provide a better price and a convenient service.  If you are looking to ship some freight (anywhere in the world) visit Advanced Freight Service.

The site fetures a dynamic rollover menu, Flash animation, and full XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS2.1 validated code.

I didn’t expect these results in one week, but here it is.

I was showing that completely ignoring the keyword metatags will have little effect on search engine placement.  On this page I tried to optimize the page for “Diamond Studded Widgets” and nothing else.  Here are my current rankings:

When searching for “Diamond Studded Widgets”, my page is . . .

Google: #1
MSN Live: #1
Yahoo: #5

Today is July 10, and I see the first ranking for the Diamond Studded Widgets page. Microsoft’s Search Engine gives the page a number one ranking for the keyphrase, “Diamond Studded Widgets.”

In three days, the page went from not existing to a number one ranking. Good news is that was easy. Bad news is that no one is making money selling diamond studded widgets, and no one is searching for diamond studded widgets. If we had tried the phrase “injury lawyer,” I doubt we would have seen such success. Why not? Because there are thousands of attorneys that would love to be number one for that phrase. Many are optimizing their sites to be successful for that phrase.

We see that Search Engine Optimization is competitive. No matter what we do, we have to compete with our competition. I’ll spend several posts describing what made that page appear so fast.

Today’s important SEO lesson: The text of links into a page are very important. The page we are working with doesn’t have any keywords or metatags to make is a success, but it does have something important. Links in.

Who would link to that page? Well, I would. I placed links to that blog post on three websites that have success in search engines. The links in read, “Diamond Studded Widgets”.

or coded (This is a single line, wrapped.):

<a href='http://blog.handsomeweb.com/2008/07/07/
diamond-studded-widgets-and-keywords/'>Diamond
Studded Widgets</a>.

Search engines value the text in your links in.

Now, go get ranked.

Gerald hired the perfect web designer for his site.  His site is beautiful, loads fast, and represents his business with a memorable, professional presentation.  But the expected jump in sales leads doesn’t happen in the first month of being on the web.  Gerald calls his web designer and asks if there is something wrong with the web site.

Diamond Studded Widgets

Gerald sells diamond studded widgets, but when he types, “diamond studded widgets” in Google, his site isn’t there. He asks, “Did you put in the right key word?”

The quick answer is, “Yes.” But the complete answer is, “Yes, but that won’t help.”

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The majority of my clients don’t want to talk about search engine optimization before I start on their website, and several of them are surprised they are not atop the Gooogle rankings for their favorite search term on the day their site goes live.  I am not joking when I say, “many clients expect to be all over Google on the day their site goes live.”

I’ve had a good bit of success with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for several of my clients over the past few years.  I’ll be sharing some of what I have learned here in this category, but I won’t tell ALL of my secrets.

I’ll start with the most important lesson about getting good search engine rankings.  It is not something to learn, but something many new site owners need to unlearn.  Keywords have absolutely NOTHING to do with your Google ranking and very little to do with ranking at other search engines.

The web is frought with “keyword generators” and “metatag machines.”  But that doesn’t change the fact that Google ignores your keywords.  Quit thinking, “Keywords,” and start thinking “optimization”.  I’ll talk about optimization in later posts.

Experiment #1: I’ll try to get this page ranked on Google for diamond studded widgets and not change the keywords. Today is July 7. Give me a couple of months and we’ll see if it works. I hope I can beat this diamond studded phone.

Only a few days since the last release, but I found an easy-to-fix bug that only appeared in some shared hosting evironments.  It was also possible to download all of the pictures at once without logging in.  Not a big security problem since they are all available on the site, but I still didn’t like that it was possible.