By Alex Johnson

If you have a home phone, you’ve probably been warned about “slamming”, a process by which unscrupulous long distance carriers switch you to their service without your permission. What a lot of people don’t know is that this type of hijacking can happen with domain names.

Unfortunately, some site owners have experienced this. Common practices include:

• A third party changing your domain’s name server information so that it points to a web host they control. Your domain name then loads the content of their choice.
• Another domain registrar transferring your domain, and charging you their higher fees.
• Unauthorized third parties creating subdomains on your domain, and using them to host their own content.

And just as the FCC has taken steps to prevent unauthorized long distance swaps, you can prevent unauthorized changes to your domain registration information by ensuring your domain registrar provides a domain lock service (not all do). Yahoo Small Business Domains is one popular domain provider who offers it at no charge.

You can modify settings for Yahoo domain names in the Yahoo Domain Control Panel, which allows you to enable Domain Locking. With this feature enabled, absolutely no changes (other than yearly renewal) can be made to the status or technical information of the domain without your explicit consent – not even by you (until you turn off Domain Locking).

Aside from registration your domain through a trusted registrar such as Yahoo Domain, you can also take help prevent domain hijacking by using private registration to hide your domain’s administrative contact information. If the administrative email address is publicly available, then a potential hijacker has two important pieces of information – the domain name, and the administrator’s email address. If they can then gain access to the administrative email address, they can modify domain settings.

Content provided by Small Business Domain, which offers domain registration tips and resources, and helps you compare major domain name providers. Visit today to learn more about Yahoo Domains and other registration services.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alex_Johnson
http://EzineArticles.com/?Protecting-Domain-Names-With-Domain-Locking&id=1241969

by Francis Haastrup

Often when it comes to choosing a domain name, people are confused about how to get started.What is the best way to choose a domain name that gets the most impact? Is shorter name better? Does it have to be keyword rich? The list goes on…

Here are 5 quick tips to help you choose a domain name.

1. Short and simple. I’ve seen others who register for 4- to 6-word domain names. Not only that it’s hard to remember, but it’s very hard to spell to others too. This is a no-no. I prefer short and simple names.

2. Keywords if possible, brand name otherwise. There’s no rule that says your domain name must be keyword rich to rank well on search engines. It has its benefits though. When people heard of a keyword rich domain name, they immediately know what the site is about. However, look at Google. It’s has strong and memorable brand. If you can’t get short and clean domain name with keywords in it, use your brand name instead.

3. Hyphenated names? No. Again the benefit of keyword-rich domain for search engine rankings is not very significant nowadays, if at all. It is also hard to spell to others.

4. Register variations. If you are to build an authority site that gets a lot of people to you site, you may want to register different variations of the domain name, such as the plural and singular forms, misspelling, etc. so when people enter it directly in the address bar of the browser, they are redirected to the right site.

5. Easy to spell. At times, you may want to tell others about your domain via telephone, in the radio or during a teleseminar. If you can’t say your domain name quickly then it can be a turn off for the audience.

While getting a good name for your site is important, there are a lot of other things that you need to focus on before you start make money from the site.

By all means spend time to choose a domain name, but don’t waste to much time in it. Make progress instead.

Are you struggling with marketing technologies to start and promote your online business?

 
About the Author
Francis Haastrup is an exptert in the Domain Name business. get google ads for free now. IT’S FREE for you at: http://www.dnbiz.blogspot.com