Choosing driving school domain name to register

Choosing a driving school website domain name is one of the most important steps you need to get right in order to effectively market your driving instructor services online with a blog as I will be showing you here. We want to make sure that whatever we choose has an effect in targeting our chosen audience as far as the search engines are concerned since that is how we intend to get most of our clients, so I will use a real life example to illustrate the point.

I want to make sure that anyone looking for driving lessons in Hampstead comes to me, so that is my target audience that I am aiming to reach via my online blog and what my marketing and advertising will be concentrated on. I therefore want the domain name I will be registering to include some or all of these target keywords and will thus opt for the name drivinglessonshampstead.co.uk (other options might be replacing 'lessons' with either 'instructor' or 'school') don't use all 3, and this will be viewed as spamming by google (the king of all search engines owning over 65% of online activities when it comes to finding information on the internet) and will be banned or penalised on their results and you don't want that happening (loss of clients and income).
It is important that your chosen name includes the town, city you are targeting as this adds more weight to search results, while it might make your website url longer, you have an added advantage over your competitors who haven't used it in theirs.

why .co.uk and not .com
The reason I have chosen a uk domain is pretty obvious, I'm located in Britain, and so is everyone that I will be doing business with so it is the logical choice, but the most important reason why I've gone for it, is because they are the cheapest to register and maintain on a yearly basis.
If you have a much more global market that you will be targeting, then you might want to consider a .com domain name or even both as some companies do.

Registering your domain name

You do this by using a domain registrar, and my prefered one is 123-Reg because they offer the lowest price on UK domains, just under £7 for 2 years (correct as at sept 2009) and have offered excellent service over the years. In order to complete this domain registration process we will need a credit card and create an account with them if we've don't have one already.

To start we will go to the 123-Reg Homepage and type in the domain name we want to register as shown below.

Click on the search button.

Untick all the options except the .co.uk name as shown below.

Click on add to basket then ok, let's continue.

On the next screen shown below, make sure you have spelt the chosen website domain name properly where it says choose your extras (mine currently has a spelling mistake 'p' missing). We will not be using any of the extras at this point, though if you want to host the website on a non free hosting platform or if you want a personalised email address using your chosen domain name for your business (e.g. enquiries@yourdrivingschool.co.uk) you can add it now (I will be dealing with these advanced features in a later article).

Click ok, let's continue.

You now have to either sign in if you already have an account with 123-Reg, or create one, as shown below.

Note: An email address is required, use your hotmail, google or other account and not your new business domain address if you added email in the steps above.

Once signed in, follow the instructions to pay for your ordered features (double check you have everything correct to avoid having to contact support as refunds are not usually given for mispelt domain names). If you have successfully completed the order, you should see a screen similar to the one below, with your ordered driving school url listed (I have corrected earlier typo).

You have now sucessfully completed the first step of establishing your school business internet website online.
To confirm this, open a web browser and type www.drivinglessonshampstead.co.uk (replace the text in bold with the domain name you have just registered), you should now get a screen similar to the one shown below.

drivinglessonshampstead.co.uk was successfully registered on 17th september 2009.

Next step creating your driving school blog.