| 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 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 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.1site.net
or check out great, expired domain names at http://www.namecart.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, visit
his site.
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