The
Importance of Having Your 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.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.adgrafix.com
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra
is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists
on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site
at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com
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/wsletter.htm
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