The
Importance of Having Your Domain Name
The Importance of Having Your Domain Name
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.yourcompany.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@yourcompany.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@yourcompany.com. For questions related
to the newsletter that you publish, you can have an email address
like editor@yourcompany.com. For comments/suggestions about your
web site, you can direct your customers to feedback@yourcompany.com
or webmaster@yourcompany.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 hosted by 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 at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3455_c&webhosting/
About the Author Article by Sumantra
Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning
specialists on the Internet. For more advice on how you can take
your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his
FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3455_c&newsletter.htm
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