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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 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@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.
Article
by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra 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
or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net
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