The
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 judgment.
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.
Sumantra Roy 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
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