The Value of Multiple Domains

More and more these days I come across web sites with more than one domain name. This is a very good idea for web promotion and marketing purposes. There are two reasons I can think of to have more than one domain name for your website.

First, and perhaps most important, is search engine exposure. One goal of web marketers is to have as many high keyword rankings as possible for your website. Accomplishing this takes a large amount of entrance pages. If you have come up with a list of 100 keyword phrases you want to be ranked under, that means at least 100 entrance pages just for one search engine.

Having multiple domain names provides a way to spread out your entrance pages so they are not listed under just one domain. I can think of several search engines that limit the number of listings from one domain name (Excite comes into mind). If you have four domain names with entrance pages, you have just quadrupled the number of listings you can have on Excite. You can have each of the entrance pages point to you main website if you wish, or you can just mirror your website on each domain.

There are two ways to go about establishing multiple domains. You can purchase the domains from Network Solutions or an alternative domain name provider (Network Solutions charges $70 for the first two years, last time I checked), or you can create a site on a free hosting provider. I like the second option. Hypermart.net provides an excellent service for free business hosting. You can even get a domain name for your Hypermart site if you wish. You can also set up an account with GeoCities or some other personal web site provider.

The second reason for having multiple domains is for testing your marketing projects. If you set up two or three seperate websites on multiple domains, it is possible to track which marketing campaigns are working best for you. You will be able to test pricing, content, layout, copy, or whatever else you can think of. Honing your marketing techniques can be extremely valuable to you so you don't waste your efforts on techniques that don't work.

Multiple domain websites are easy to set up and don't necessarily require a large investment in domain name registration fees if you opt for free hosting. The results you get are definitely worth the time it takes to upload a few files to another domain.

Dan Kramer
KloakIt

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