Update: October 30, 2018
Do you think that you need a domainers glossary of terms? You may have decided that you want to own a domain. I’m sure that you have noticed quite a bit of domaining terms that you have come across that you should learn before you buy a domain.
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Understanding domaining terms are essential if you want to have a successful domaining business. Learning about the domain industry has been quite fun for me. Domaining is developing, monetizing, buying and selling domains with the intent of making a profit just like in real estate.
Domaining consists of many terms that you have to know to become successful in your domaining business. In this post, I put together a few terms that are commonly used in the domaining industry. It is my goal to continue to educate myself and help pass my knowledge to new people who are interested in domaining.
17 Terms That Domainers Should Know!
Brandable - Facebook, Google, Yahoo these are brandable domain names. The names consist of possible mix matched dictionary words or made up words.
Brandable names are easy, catchy words that a business use to build their online identity. If you have an e-commerce site how will you stand out?
If you have the right name, this will help you develop your online identity. You want to make sure that your name is pronounceable, short and easy to spell.
Buy It Now - If you use Buy It Now you are merely buying the domain now rather than bidding in an auction format. It is a fixed price that you are willing to buy from the seller.
ccTLD - ccTLD stands for Country Code Top Level Domain and is the two letter extension represent geographical regions that a country uses to show where a website is registered. For instance, Canada’s ccTLD is “ca” Australia is “.au” France is “fr.”
Basically, you are sending a signal to search engines that your website focuses on a specific country and this, in turn, will get you more of the hits that you want with the correct ccTLD ending. You can find a list of these extensions at the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
Comparables - These are domain sales of similar domains that have sold around the same price. Comparable domain sales are used to justify the asking price to a potential seller/ buyer for a domain.
End User - A buyer who is interested in purchasing and developing a domain into a functional and relevant website for personal or business-related use.
Escrow - Is a company that makes sure that all transactions are done efficiently and adequately between buyer and seller. Escrow will request payment from the domain buyer, and the domain seller will transfer the domain to the buyer and escrow will release payment to the seller.
New gTLD - You probably know about .com, .org, .gov, and .edu. Well, there are new gTLD's such as .vegas, .club, .marketing, .news that makes it possible for business owners or nonbusiness owners to purchase a domain name under an extension that fits with their industry.
Moreover, these new extensions help business owners to reach out to their specific audience, and also help how personal brands appear online.
TLD stands for Top Level Domain - It is also known as domain extension. This happens at the last part of a domain name after the last period. For instance google.com The “com” is the extension.
Domain Tasting(Grace Delete) - This refers to registering a domain name for a five day grace period. If you decide to cancel the domain within the five days, the registrar must refund you your money.
Domain Transfer - This is moving your domain registration from one registrar to another registrar. People have various reasons for wanting to move their domain out of their current registrar.
Domain Parking - This is where you park your domain with a parking service that hosts your domain name and sets that domain name up on a webpage to show ads that are typically relevant to your domain name. You earn money when consumers click on the ads placed on your domain page.
Push - This is pushing your domain from your registrar to a persons account under the same registrar. The transaction is free. Let’s say Camille owns Cupcakes.vegas registered at NameCheap and she sells the domain to Karen.
All Karen has to do is sign up at NameCheap and have Camille push Cupcakes.vegas into Karen’s account.
Registrar - To use a domain name it has to be registered with a registrar that acts on behalf of the person wanting to acquire the domain name.
The registrar does a lot of functions, but mainly they check to see if the domain name is available and if so, the person pays a registration fee of the domain name to use from one year to up to ten years of personal use. Educate yourself and check out these domain registrar reviews.
Renew - This is where the domain owner pays to re-register their domain for another term typically one year. The ownership will remain the same for the new length of the term. If the name is not renewed, then the domain goes into a deletion cycle once it reaches its expiration date.
Retail Pricing - You as the owner of the domain name feel that there is a certain fair price that an end user should pay for your domain. You base this price on market research, your pricing practice and other factors that you feel apply to that domain sale.
Type-In Traffic - This refers to users typing in an URL directly into a web address bar instead of accessing the site through a search in one of the search engines. Domain traffic is what you need to have a successful website.
Wholesale Pricing - This is the price of a domain that is lower than the retail price of the domain name. You can think of this as the price to liquidate the domain. If you want to sell the domain fast, then you will price it lower than the retail value.
Your goal is to learn the domaining game!
The domaining industry offers many opportunities for individuals who want to learn the game and make a decent profit.
The first step is to learn a few key terms that I provided in this domainers glossary post so that you understand what other domainers are saying! Moreover, there is nothing worse when speaking to a fellow domainer and not understanding the lingo.
When you are learning the whole concept of domaining, there are more technical terms that might be a bit heavy that you will want to learn more about than what this post covers.
Of course, I just touched the surface of domaining terms that I have found are common for newbies to understand and learn quickly.
For instance, here are a few more terms that newbie domainers should have in their knowledge base.
Referring Domains - This term represents a list of domains that are linking back to the queried domain.
Organic Competitors - This term represents a domain name’s top competitors for search engine traffic.
Domain Authority - This term represents a calculated metric that measures how a domain will likely rank in Google’s SERPs. Basically, it anticipates the performance of the website in Search Engine Rankings.
Robots.Txt - The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a practice to block cooperative web crawlers and other web bots from gaining access to all or part of a website that is otherwise publicly visible.
Page Authority - This term represents a calculated way of measuring the strength of website pages. It is used to anticipate the probability of an individual page to rank adequately, regardless of the content of the page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This term represents revamping the process of increasing the quality of traffic, the quantity of traffic and organic results to your website from search engines through search or organic results.
The higher your business ranks in the SERP, you increase your chances of visitors clicking on your link and visiting your webpage. SEO contains active and technical components to improve rankings, increase knowledge and drive good traffic to your website.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - This term represents a keyword/phrase query typed into a search engine. The user will type in a search query (or better known as keywords/keyphrase).
The search engine will return ten organic results per page, paid advertising and related searches.
Do you have any other terms to contribute to this post?