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What is a Domain Name?
Think of a domain name as an address you write on an envelope. It's a way your web site can be found by anyone in the world using the internet. The actual name is a human readable version of what the domain name actually is. And that is a bunch of numbers. I'm afraid it's true, your precious web site domain name is actually something like 234.123.456.54 or something like that. Now that bunch of numbers isn't very user friendly, so the clever web browsers translate the domain name you enter in the address bar in the the numbers, and hey presto, your web site pops up. You domain is separated by some DOTS, and we'll talk about these now.
Lets take www.yahoo.com as an example to work from. I'm pretty sure most of you will have heard of Yahoo. The first part of the domain name is WWW which means World Wide Web. This is a location on your web server. It could just as easily be BBB, XXX or infact any word at all. Many companies have different parts of their organisation split into sub-domains as they call them. So taking Yahoo as an example, they might have a structure like this: www.yahoo.com for their main web site, advertising.yahoo.com for their ad team and ideas.yahoo.com for their think tank of ideas people. These sub domains are really easy to set up.
The second part is YAHOO and this is what identifies the organisation or company, or the keywords you are targeting in particular. Today, millions and millions of domains have been registered that bear no resemblance to a companies name, but might be relevant to a certain product line, or a movie or again a certain set of key words.
And finally, the last part which is the .COM Generally, this is known as the TLD, or top-level domain name.
There are many TLD extensions at the moment and each country has their own. The most common is the .COM and this is the one everyone wants, however it is getting increasingly difficult to pick a .COM address up these days, and there is big money to be made registering expired .COM addresses that people just forget to renew. Some of them can be sold on for thousands of dollars - no kidding!
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