Web Hosting Reviews and Tips

Are you losing visitors to your domain? Are your search engine rankings still yours?

There are countless stories of hackers who have overtaken other’s search engine rankings and redirected intended website visitors, with victims who have not even noticed.

These stories consist of a domain URL listed in search engine results on Google, MSN and Yahoo. In the search engine results, most people that click on a person’s domain URLs are sent to their website. However, some people that click their domain URLs are sent to a totally unrelated website that has nothing to do with the intended target, even though the original domain name URL is displayed in the browser. These consumers than see a completely different site that has literally nothing to do with the one sponsored by the victim or their company.

How do these hackers steal Visitors?

Hackers exploit a flaw in the software some domain name servers use by sending incorrect information to these particular domain name servers, hackers compromise the domain name server to redirect the traffic for the URLs to another site.

If domain name servers do not use a method to validate that the information has come from valid or authoritative source, it will send visitors to the wrong pages. This means that people who enter your domain name URL in the web browser will be sent to the hacker’s pages instead of your pages.

How can you protect your website?

It is extremely important that you use a reliable host that does not use an open DNS server. To check this, go to www.dnsreport.com and enter the domain name URL of your website. You should see PASS in the Open DNS servers line. If your domain name fails the test, you should contact your web host. If you don’t want to expose your website to hackers, it is critical that you use a secure DNS server. If your web host cannot fix the issue, you should change to another web host.

If you are a beginner on your first steps towards building a website I would like to try to help make things a little easier from the start. When I first started my quest to join the web I knew absolutely nothing. From experience I’ve learned each step has an affect on the end result. There are many decisions you will have to make on your way to having a website but your domain name is where it starts. Your domain name is what you are calling the site that you are building. So choosing a domain name is important to your site.

Here are some things that I found needs to be thought out carefully:

1.    What is your web site going to be about? Here’s where you need to get as specific with what your goal is for your site. What do you enjoy, if you want to sell a product, then what domain name might make a person think of your product.

2.    To get more free traffic to your site focus on the keywords that people might search for. By keywords I mean if you were selling fishing poles then FISHING POLES would be your keywords.

3.    Try to get a dot com domain name because people are used to remembering a dot com name.

4.    I know when you start out it’s hard to think of just one theme for you web site. If you go too broad with your topic it will make it very hard to get ranked with the search engines. If you haven’t yet, you will read about the word “niche”. This is what I’m talking about. Fishing is a very broad term but fishing poles is very specific. So fishing poles would become your niche.

I hope this helped to make things a little easier for you. I know getting started can be overwhelming at times. If you keep in mind your end goal and put thought in each step then eventually it will all come together.

Have you ever wondered how people make money online “buying” domain names? During the big Internet boom of the early 90’s I was fascinated with domain brokering, however, it wasn’t until years later I actually learned how to make money as a domain broker.

Your first hurdle usually comes when you find out you don’t even own the domain name, rather you are merely renting it. You can rent the domain name indefinitely, but owning it isn’t an option.

The logical question from novice domain brokers is: “If you are renting a domain name, how can you make money brokering it?” After all, if you are renting an apartment you can’t make money brokering it to another renter. Can you? In a word, no.

But you don’t need to own domain names to make money with them, if you did, domain brokering wouldn’t be so popular. Using the apartment example, lets look at it like this. When you rent an apartment no one else can rent it. You live there. You take up that space, so nobody else can use it. The same goes for the Internet.

A top level domain name can only point to one website at a time, and that is where domain brokering comes into play.

Do you see how domain brokering works? You are essentially leasing or transferring the domain name rights to another company.

While you can theoretically broker any domain name, it helps if the domain you are trying to broker has some equity.

What is domain name equity? Well, lets look at it with another real world example. If you own property in Atherton, California (currently the most expensive city to buy property in in the US), it is likely to be worth more than property anywhere else in the United States. The Internet isn’t much different. In fact, most of the offline business models have online counterparts. Domain brokering is the equivalent to a land developer. Or at the very least a real estate agent.

When you broker a domain you sell the rights to that domain to another company, or you lease the name to them for a period of time. You make money, because the domain name has value, either because it is currently trendy, or it fits into the company’s niche.

Lets explore these options a little further.

First, take the trendy option. If you have been a part of the online community for a little while, you know which sites are currently the top hangouts. They’re trendy, and there are a lot of other sites out there offering supplementary services to these sites. They are often similarly named and styled. Often, domain name brokers will create derivative names for the “in” sites. These names are now in their portfolio. As popularity grows for the site, demand also grows for good domain names to offer supplementary services through. This is where the domain broker’s portfolio comes into play.

Brokering the domain names now will result in profit. The amount of profit depends greatly on the demand for the domain name, and the experience of the broker.

One case of trendy domain brokering is casino.mobi, which was brokered for $135,000. This isn’t an unheard of amount for domain brokering, some portfolios are worth millions. However, it was a milestone for the .mobi top level domain names.

What about niches? You know the expression: “find a niche and fill it.” Niches are what drives business on the web today. They are also lend themselves to domain brokering.

Let’s use a fishing example here. But before we do we will have to zero in on our niche. Fishing isn’t a niche, it is an umbrella term. Fly fishing is a niche, so is deep sea angling. The more granular you can make your topic, the more potential you have to dominate it on the Internet.

The deep sea angling niche is granular enough to rank in, yet still gives us some room to grow. And since it is our passion, we were able to build up a lot of content on the topic. We have even found like-minded people to share our passion with. We now have a community. This domain, let us call it YourDeepSeaAnglingSite.com, now has equity.

If you were looking into brokering this domain name now, you would see that it is more valuable than it was when you first got it. How much more depends on what you’ve done with it.

These are just two examples of how to make money in the large and lucrative domain brokering industry. Which is just one of many ways people make money online today. Hopefully you have enjoyed this article as much as I have writing it for you. And that it has helped to clear away some of the mystery surrounding domain brokering.