Locating the right domain name is very important for the branding of a business and the business website. These are my favorite sites for researching and finding domain name. This is the process that I will go through in selecting a domain name for a business website.

Keywords
My first step is to identify keyword phrases that are getting good traffic. There are a number of good research tools that are free.

1. Google Adwords Free tool based on PPC data
2. WordTracker Free tool based on search data

Locate Domain Names
I have two research tools that I will use to search using the keywords I want.

1. DomainsBot: Reasearch based on keyword phrases. Advanced features let you select based on many parameters including maximum number of characters.
2. NameBoy: Generates possible names based on Keywords and displays results in an easy to scan table showing results for all possible TLD’s (COM, NET, ORG, etc.)

Other Domain Research Tools

1. Buy and Sell Domains: Sedo is the leading marketplace for buying and selling used domain names
2. Expiring Domains: DropScout shows domains expiring (Pending Delete) in the next 6 days. Search by age, PR or number of characters.
3. Whois Search: Very complete set of whois info as well as screenshot, history and SEO information
4. Free Domain Appraisal: This is a free service and the results are always on the high side. This is still a good quick estimate.
5. Internet Archive: What websites have been on a domain name in the past.

When it comes to buying the domain, I recommend that you come you come to one of my websites DougWilliams.com or Dwassoc.com

Spam in all its forms is a costly problem to business. Spam is considered to be unsolicited junk messages that are usually designed to sell or promote something. Spamming can mean using unethical tactics to get high search engine rankings. Spam continues to plague the Internet in the forms of email spam, spam blogs (splogs) and comment spam.

Email spam is a time waster to businesses. Most use extensive filtering software to eliminate email before it arrives. As an example, at our web servers, out of 25,000 incoming emails, 20,000 were tagged as “definitely spam” and deleted before being delivered. Secondary filters identified and filtered an additional 3500 spam email. This means 94% of all incoming email on our server is actual spam and only 6% was legitimate emails.

Spam problems have made traditional email newsletters much less effective. They either don’t make it thru to recipients or people are overwhelmed with spam and don’t read them. Business Blog Marketing is now a much more effective way of reaching and communicating with your audience. They can either find you thru searching or subscribe for delivery by email or their feed reader.

Spam blogs or splogs, automatically extract information from RSS feeds and re-publish the posting. These are low-cost automated sites that usually make their money by getting viewers to click on ads on the splog site. These damage the original blog poster by stealing content and they are a problem to blog readers because they contain random links and content that turn out to be junk and a waste of time to visit.

Comment spam is a major problem like email spam where automated bots place promotional comments on random blogs in an effort to promote a product, service or website. Much like email spam, spam filters remove a high percentage of this nuisance.

Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Filters, blacklists and penalties from the search engines help keep this in check, but these are still major issues we must deal with.

It is a war out there! Spammers are sending junk emails and people are protecting themselves with stronger and stronger spam filters. As a business web hosting company, we help set up spam filters. We also and answer questions as to why our clients emails are not making it through. So what are some things you can do to help legitimate email get through and not tagged as junk email?

So what kinds of things do spam filters look for?

1. Messages with multiple images.
2. Messages with highly formatted HTML
3. Using excess capital letters or punctuation
4. Using certain phrases such as free, trial, money, as seen on TV, and so on.
5. No subject line or a Re: and no subject
6. Certain types of attachments

Images
Spammers will use images as “Web beacons.” They will contain bits of code that will secretly send a message back to the sender that they have reached a real email address. As a receiver, you should set your email program to not allow automatic downloading of pictures and you shouldn’t download pictures from an unknown source.

Do not reply to spam
unless you’re certain that the message comes from a reliable source. This includes not responding to such messages that offer an option to “Remove me from your list.” You may be notifying a spammer that he has reached a real email address.

Attachments
Sending any type of attachment may cause some email filters to reject your email or discard your attachment. In particular, don’t send .exe and .bmp files as they can have viruses included in them. Attaching an Access database file is almost always rejected as is any other program files. These should always be zipped first and then sent.

Doug Williams, Internet Marketing Consultant

What is it?
Spammers can either send unsolicited bulk emails from a temporary email account or they can hack into another computer and send it from there. Anti-spam services like SpamCop receive reports of spam and create an “email blacklist” of reported spammers by IP address. People who run email services and systems, configure them to reject emails that come from a “blacklisted” computer.

Now there are well over 100 email blacklists. There are two basic types, those that blacklist a single IP address and those that blacklist a large block of IP addresses.

The blacklist of a single computer is much easier to be removed from. You will be asked to show that you have repaired the security breach that allowed the spamming or show that the offending account was removed from that server.

The “Guilt by Association” type of blacklist that lists a large block of IP addresses is a much tougher one to fix. The companies that prepare the blacklists know that it is easy for an unethical spammer to rotate through a block of IP addresses, so they blacklist a large block… up to 1000 IP addresses. Now this catches many thousands of innocent email senders that get their emails rejected because of someone they don’t know or even have any relationship with.

How to Avoid?
The best way is to only purchase hosting services through someone who has a zero tolerance policy toward spam. We learned our lesson. Like many Internet marketing and web design firms, we supply hosting. Ours is a very high quality business class hosting with all the support, bells and whistles.

Even though our hosting has a zero tolerance Spam policy, we housed our computer in a data center that had a lenient Spam enforcement policy. We spent an enormous amount of time fighting these “Guilt by Association” blacklists.

About one year ago we moved to a new data center that had a very strict zero tolerance Spam policy. In the last year, we have not had a single blacklisting incident. Although this data center cost us twice as much, we have saved a tremendous amount in technical support costs. Lesson learned: Cheaper hosting is not suitable for hosting business websites.

Doug Williams

The web server (computer) is where your web site’s html files, graphics, etc. reside and is known as the web host. A Web Hosting Service provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web.

Web hosting is typically includes email services, databases such as MySQL and statistics packages that track volume, how visitors arrive and what pages they view. Web servers typically use one of two primary operating systems. Apache (Linux) accounts for approximately 60% of the market and Windows (Microsoft) accounts for about 30%. There are a number of other players that make up the remainder. Apache (Linux) is frequently referred to PHP hosting.

Businesses need assurances of uptime and reliability. These frequently are missing on inexpensive hosting providers. Business web hosting should include regular data backups, 24/7 monitoring, and email filtering for virus and Spam. Other important features are FTP access, multiple power backup systems and multiple Internet feeds are present.

Web hosting companies typically offer other services such as domain names and digital certificates. Some will offer other web services such as web design, content changes and web programming.

At Doug Williams and Associates we offer a full range of business web hosting, design and programming services. We offer PHP database and web application programming. In addition we offer Search Engine Optimization and marketing consulting services so business owners can have a single source for their web marketing and maintenance needs.

Analyzing your website traffic is a valuable tool for understanding how many visitors your website is receiving and how they are coming to your website. Website statistics packages are part of most business hosting plans. Our hosting plans provide both Webalizer Web Stats and AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics). Here are 5 key areas that website statistics supply insight into your website visitors.

1. Activity: This is the number of visitors that visit each day, week or month. AWStats shows visits and unique visitors for each month. Unique visitors are first time visitors while visits include new and returning visitors. You can see how many pages were viewed and what days of the week and month that visitors came to your website.
2. Location: This is the location your visitors are coming from. This will show the country where your visitor was from.
3. Robots/Spiders: You can see which search engine spiders are indexing your website and how often they are returning.
4. Navigation: You can see how long your visitors are staying once they arrive, which pages they view, entry pages and exit pages.
5. Source: Track which search engines are sending visitors and see which keyword phrases are being used. You can see which websites are referring visitors to you.

The purpose of these statistics is to understand your website and look for problems that you can fix. You may need to adjust your keywords or maybe visitors are leaving as soon as they arrive which means you need to change your home page message or graphics. This is essential information for your Internet marketing campaign.

Can the business web hosting you choose improve your SEO results? I think it would be more accurate to say that choosing the wrong web hosting provider can really hurt your search engine results. For your business website, you should not make your hosting decision based on a cheap price. As a web optimization firm, we carefully select our web hosting to be search engine friendly.

What should you look for? First, find a hosting plan with a dedicated IP address. The best situation would be to have your own server and only place your website on this server. Now this is not practical for all but some very large businesses. The next best thing is to have a dedicated IP address on a shared server. The search engines place more importance on websites that have a unique IP address.

When you locate your website on a cheap web hosting server, you need to be concerned with your neighborhood. Cheap web hosting seems to attract spammers which leads to sites being banned the server being blacklisted. If a website is blacklisted on the same server, or even on another server in the same facility, your website URL may become grouped into the blacklisted IP address range. Choose hosting with a “no Tollerance” policy toward spam.

Choose web hosting with a 100% uptime. If a web crawler finds your website inaccessible (404 error) on multiple attempts, your website will be de-listed from the search engine rankings.

Choosing a quality hosting provider is very important and the price difference between the best and a cheap provider is very minnow when compared to the cost of a SEO campaign.

How should a business choose a business web hosting service? The decision should be based on reliability, service, spam filtering, security and similar business required services. Today, bringing website visitors and search engine visibility are critical to businesses. In general, hosting is so universally inexpensive that price should not be a major part of the decision.

So what should a business look for?

1. Do you need a Windows or Linux hosting server? If your website uses PHP, you will need a Linux server, Apache+Linux is better. Your web hosting service should support use of PHP, Perl, and JAVA.
2. Client access to Control Panel for setting up email accounts, and configuring website settings.
3. Website statistics and traffic reports to track visitors.
4. Support multiple domains per hosting account.
5. 24/7 FTP Access.
6. 24/7 Server Technical Monitoring.
7. Dedicated IP address – Important for SEO.
8. Daily, weekly and monthly Database and Web Page Backups.
9. Email virus filtering.
10. Multiple Email spam filtering options.
11. WebMail Access with secure login.
12. MySQL databases for web applications
13. Webmaster support available for content changes.
14. PHP Programming support available for changes and troubleshooting.
15. SEO (search engine optimization) services available.
16. Digital certificates purchase and installation available.
17. Ability to purchase and maintain domain names.