The Importance of Your Own Domain
The Importance of Owning Your Own DomainName Owning Your OwnDomain Name is Important By JimO'Keefe A question that I frequently hear is "Do I really need to havemy own domain name?" The one word answer is "YES.". If you putup your site with some of the free web hosting services, theonly company who benefits is the web hosting company. The lastperson who benefits is you.There are a number of reasons why having your own domain name isa must: 1) When ...
...you have your own domain name, the addressof your web site will be of the form http://www.yoursite.com. Onthe other hand, if you put up your site on one of the freeservers, the address of your web site will be something likehttp://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Which of these twosounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and ishence easier to remember? I leave you to make thejudgement. 2) The only way to make money online is to build upcredibility among your customers. Having your own domain name isthe first step in doing that. Your customers will feel morecomfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if youhave your own domain name. It makes your customers feel thatthey are dealing with a large, established company, rather thanwith some fly by night operator. 3) When you have your domain name, you can havemultiple email aliases of the form alias@yoursite.com. Thisallows you to assign different email aliases to differentfunctions, all of them pointing to your actual email address.Hence, for example, for questions related to the products andservices that you sell, you can have an email address likesales@yoursite.com. For questions related to the newsletter thatyou publish, you can have an email address likeeditor@yoursite.com. For comments/suggestions about your website, you can direct your customers to feedback@yoursite.com orwebmaster@yoursite.com. Having different email addresses fordifferent functions not only makes it easier for you to filteryour email using your email client program (Eudora Pro, PegasusMail, Outlook Express etc.), but also gives your customers theimpression that yours is a large, established company with whomit is safe to do business. 4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis tothe home page of a particular domain, i.e. other thingsremaining the same, a home page of a domain will often rankhigher for a particular keyword than any other page. When youuse some of the free hosting services, your index.html page isthe home page of your site, but not of that domain. Hence inthese search engines, your site will find it very difficult tomake it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for someof the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount oftraffic that you will lose if this happens. 5) Some search engines are now refusing to spiderthe web sites which are hosted by the free web hosts. Forinstance, if you have a site hosted by the free web hosts, youwould, until recently, have got the infamous error messagesaying that too many pages have been submitted from your site ifyou tried to submit your site to AltaVista. While AltaVista nowsays that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if youtry to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spiderany site belonging to many of the free web hosts even though itsays that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that? 6) When your site is hosted by some of the free webhosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in amajor directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admitthat it won't add a commercial site which is being hosted in oneof the free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if youcan get your site listed by Yahoo!!. Listing your site withYahoo! 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 convincedthat you need one right now? The small fee that you pay per yearfor your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefitsthat you get. You can check out the availability of domain namesand register new domains at: http://the-easy-way.com/webhosting.html Webmasters and EzinePublishers:Free content for your newsletter or your website! You are invited to use this article in your newsletter orwebsite. The only requirement is the inclusion of the following,after each article used: James O'Keefe is the owner of My Millionaire Friend offering FREE articles, tips, hints, and real-world adviceon how to make money with your website. Visit his site or joinhis FREE newsletter, by sending a blank email to mailto:Newsletter.
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