Nominet have today (at long last!) launched online domain name transfers.

A registrant transfer is the process where the legal registrant transfers ownership of a domain name to another party. The old system was paper based requiring transfer forms completed by both parties had to be posted to Nominet with copies of suitable identification. Apart from the time consuming job of completing the transfer forms in the first place, the actual transfer took around 5 days before it was complete.

The new system is based entirely online and the transfer can be completed in a matter of minutes. Once a sale has been agreed, the transfer is initiated by the current registrant, Nominet will then send an email to the purchaser with a link to follow to complete the transfer. This must be completed within 5 days otherwise the original registrant transferring the domain names will have to start the process again. The whole process can be done in a matter of minutes.

For more info can be found at Nominet Transfer FAQ

Why buy a domain name?
Virtually every business has (or should have) a web site today and the obvious choice for a domain name is usually the company name or as close to it as possible if the preferred domain is already in use by someone else.

.com or .co.uk?
If your business is a global one and trades outside of the UK then both the .com and .co.uk should be used, however if you only have UK clients then a co.uk is the preffered choice however the .com is always worth having as clients may not remember and there is always the danger of a competitor registering the .com and taking your clients.

Google
Getting listed on Google is key to finding new clients and whilst a company domain name (if not too general) is likley to be found fairly easily by people searching for the company name, this will only ever happen by existing clients who already know of your services but have just forgotten your website. You are unlikely to get much new business this way. So what do you do? The quick solution is to pay Google to advertise your services or products. This will very quickly get you listed on the right hand side of Google’s search results for keywords you specify and you will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad, whether or not you make a sale. For a lot of businesses this can be an excelent way of getting new clients, but you have to spend a lot of time checking that you are getting a good return on investemt (ROI), i.e. you make more profit than you spend on google ads.

There is however a way of getting long term free clicks from Google. Ideally you would want a potential customer to search for your products and find your company website on the left hand side (the non paid for results) of Google results. Say for instance you own a hotel in Cornwall called the Victoria Hotel. Anyone searching for “victoria hotel cornwall” (I don’t know if that exists or not) will probably be able to find their website if they have one, however only people that know of the existence (mainly existing customers) of the hotel will be searching for it. Much more likley is someone searching for “hotel cornwall” and with such a competitive phrase it would take a huge amount of effort in search engine optimisation (SEO) for the Victoria Hotel to be listed high in the search results as there is so much competiton.

Google has spent years trying to optimise its algorithms to try and list the most relevant sites in its search results first. One of the most important factors that google considers the domain name itself. The theory being that the name itself cannot be changed (even though 1000’s of pages on the domain can be) so it is assumed that if the domain name IS the keyword phrase then it has a high chance of being relevant to the searcher. In the above example the domain hotelcornwall.co.uk would be an ideal starting point for getting high rankings for the term “hotel cornwall”, and this is where we come in as we have hundreds of keyword rich domain names ripe for some SEO work with the ultimate aim of getting free traffic from Google. If you were No 1 in google for hotel cornwall, there would be no need to pay google for advertising.

Like fine wines, domain names tend to appreciate in value as they get older, especially as search engine positioning and backlinks improve over time.