|
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.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3761&webhosting/
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/t.cgi?3761
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?3761&newsletter.htm
|
