IMPORTANCE
OF HAVING YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME
By Sumantra Roy
A question
that I frequently hear is "Do I really need to have my own domain name?"
The one word
answer
is "YES.". If you put up your site with some of the free web hosting
services, the only company
who benefits is the web hosting company. The last person who benefits is you.
There are a number
of reasons why having your own domain name is a must:
1) When
you have your own domain name, the address of your web site will be of the form
http://www.yoursite.com. On the other hand, if you put up your site on one of
the free servers,
the address of your web site will be something like http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/.
Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and
is hence
easier to remember? I leave you to make the judgement.
2) The only
way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having
your own domain name is the first step in doing that. Your customers will feel
more comfortable
buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own domain name.
It makes your customers
feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with
some fly by night operator.
3) When
you have your domain name, you can have multiple email aliases of the form alias@yoursite.com.
This allows you to assign different email aliases to different functions, all
of them pointing to your actual
email address. Hence, for example, for questions related to the products and
services that you sell,
you can have an email address like sales@yoursite.com. For questions related
to the newsletter that
you publish, you can have an email address like editor@yoursite.com. For comments/suggestions
about
your web site, you can direct your customers to feedback@yoursite.com or webmaster@yoursite.com.
Having different email addresses for different functions not only makes it easier
for you to filter your email
using your email client program (Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express etc.),
but also gives your
customers the impression that yours is a large, established company with whom
it is safe to do business.
4) Many
search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular domain,
i.e. other things
remaining the same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular
keyword than any
other page. When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html
page is the home page
of your site, but not of that domain. Hence in these search engines, your site
will find it very difficult to
make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really
competitive keywords. Just
think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens.
5) Some
search engines are now refusing to spider the web sites which are hosted by
the free web hosts.
For instance, if you have a site hosted by the free web hosts, you would, until
recently, have got the
infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your
site if you tried to
submit your site to AltaVista. While AltaVista now says that "your URL
has been submitted for processing"
if you try to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spider any site
belonging to many of the free web
hosts even though it says that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that?
6) When
your site is hosted by some of the free web hosts, you will find it very difficult
to get it listed in a
major directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it won't
add a commercial site which is
being hosted in one of the free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle
if you can get your site listed by
Yahoo!!. Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough even when you have
your own domain. Don't
make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.
If you do
not currently have a domain name, are you convinced that you need one right
now? The small
fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the
benefits that you get.
You can check out the availability of domain names and register new domains
here.
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Article
by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search
engine positioning
specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine placement, subscribe
to his 1st Search
Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com
or by
going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net
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