If you are setting up a website business, including setting up a blog, this article is for you and is here to help you to understand how to choose your website domain name and hosting company.

Paid for hosting or free hosting?

I would always recommend that you go for paid hosting and the reason for this is that you have more control over what you can and cannot do with you website pages and of course this is more professional.

A web hosting company that I use a lot is GoDaddy.com who are based in the USA and have a really great service where you can buy an all ready registered domain name. One of the benefits I have found with GoDaddy’s service is that they have a helpline which, even though I live in the UK, I have used a few times and it is sometimes very useful to be able to speak to someone in person in order to resolve an issue quickly and easily. There are not many web hosting companies that provide a free technical helpline like this.

If you buy an already registered domain name that is at least two-three years old, and if you are lucky it may already have visitors and a Google ranking, you will find it much easier to get onto page one of a Google search. Google tends to put “New” domain names on “hold”, just in case they have been set up as a spamming site, so a newly registered name will take much longer to be indexed and move up the page rankings.

So if you go to the GoDaddy.com website and go to the “Auctions” tab located at the top of this page you will be able to choose from hundreds of already registered website domain names. You can even get these for as little as $5!

So a suggestion, if you are setting up a website about let say “Phone Services” try putting this into GoDaddy’s “Keyword” box and change the “Keyword” “begins with” to “contains” and this will list all those sites containing your keywords. You could try entering one word at a time, so firstly try “Phone” and secondly, “Services” and see what comes up.

If you find a website domain name you like in this search, here is very useful Free tool called the Wayback Machine which will not only tell you how old this website domain name is, but also you can have a look at what it looks like by clicking on the historical pages.

The GoDaddy site will also tell you how many monthly visitors the site is presently receiving, although this is not as important as the age of the site.

The other check you can do for your potential domain name purchase is to check how many links are already pointing to it. Click here to get the free Link Popularity Check software and follow the instructions for this. What you will find is that you can very quickly enter this new domain name into this link checking software and with one click, you will see within seconds the links pointing to your chosen domain name from Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. This link information might give you an indication of the likely Google ranking it already has. For example, if there are 4-5 links under the Google column you might find this site has a Google Page rank of a one or two, of course this is not guaranteed.

I have decided to make this blog a “Do Follow” blog so that if you leave a comment on my posts you will receive a “follow” link to your website.

So what does that mean for you?

If you do not already understand the “No follow” rule I will explain this first. If a link from your website to another website has a “no follow” rule against it then Google will not count that as a link for PR ranking purposes.

In most cases, when a person makes a comment on a blog, the link back to their own website will include the “no follow” rule and therefore, Google will exclude this as a link back to that website. The reason blogs started to include the “no follow” rule was to restrict the number of spam comments, however, if you use a spam comment checker like Askimet then the amount of spam that gets through is limited.

Therefore, by removing the “no follow” rule this will encourage people to make comments on your blog and to return to your blog in the future.

So if you like the content of my blog and you want to receive a Google recognised link back to your own website, then please spend a bit of time posting your comments to my content.

However, please will you make your comments relevant to the post and to the content of this site and please do not spam me. Spammers will be found out and all comments will then be removed. Also, your website will then be black-marked so that you will find it harder to make comments on this and other blogs in the future, so play fair please.

By the way, thank you for stopping by and for taking your time out to read my blog site and I will say that comments that are meaningful to my posts are always gratefully received.

Finally, if you feel that what my blog has to offer is good and if you have made a few comments that link to your website, I would appreciate it if you could post a link back to me and not necessarily from the same website, in fact, it would be better for your link-back to come from another website so that the reciprocal link will have a better effect on the Google rankings for your and my website.

I have learnt that getting a high PR rank on Google is not the be all and end all for SEO and web traffic.

I used to think that chasing a higher Google PR rank was what it was all about and that this in itself would lead to more visitors and therefore more online sales… but I have found that this is certainly not the case.

I have recently started to learn more and more that if you have a quality website with quality pages and good content, which have been optimised for the right search term, then these will rank highly on the search pages, including Google, even if Google has ranked your page with a PR as low as zero!

Also, I have recently come across websites that have a high Google PR rank and yet they have a low Alexa rank (for those that don’t know Alexa, they count traffic to your website and rank your website according to traffic volume, with the aim being to get as low a “Alexa Number” as possible and preferably in the 100,000 and below range), meaning that you are receiving a high volume of search engine traffic. I recently saw a website with a Google PR5 and an Alexa rank of over 5 million, which just goes to show that PR does not equate to traffic, which in turn does not translate into customers and ultimately cash.

To achieve high traffic volumes you need to get links to your site from other “High traffic volume sites” and get good rankings on “Good” search terms for your products and services. One way to get higher rankings on the search engines for your chosen search terms is to optimise your web pages using Internet Business Promoter (IBP).