Using multiple domain names for website can help your customers find you more effectively

When looking for a Web site, many of us simply enter the name of a company or product followed by .com. We assume that will get us to the site we want, and it often works. How will your customers look for you online? Will they all enter the same thing, or are there several 'identities' they make try?

Do you know that you can have several domain names all pointing to the same Web site? There are several reasons you may want to have multiple URLs. For example, you might register URLs containing your company name, product name, and descriptive keywords. They could each point to a unique site, or they could all point to the same site or specific landing pages within a site.

I recently had to buy a replacement glass tray for my microwave oven. (Have you ever seen what happens when a heavy piece of glass hits a tile floor? It is actually sort of spectacular, although I do not recommend you try it.) I figured that I would call a few appliance stores and have a replacement in no time.

But everyone said it would be weeks to get the tray I needed. I went online and ended up at a site called MicrowaveGlassTray.com. Really. I had the tray in just a few days.

The microwave store I bought from was not named Microwave Glass Tray. They may have several domains registered with keywords for the various products and services they offer. I found them because I was looking for a microwave glass tray.

Having keywords for which your customers search in your domain name will help your ranking in search results. And, some people may stumble onto your site by typing in the keywords with a .com at the end.

You may want to register misspellings of your name or business name, so that people who enter the wrong spelling of your company name, for example, still reach your site. If you have changed Web URLs, you could have both the old and the new names pointing to the new site.

The mechanics of this are simple. An easy way is to set up forwarding with your domain registrar. That's the place where you selected and registered the domain name. Some will allow you to redirect the domain name you registered to any URL.

Make it easy for your customers to remember you by using simple, descriptive URLs--and use more than one, if that will help customers find you.

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