The
Importance of Having Your Domain Name
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, click
here.
