When you first start looking around for a dedicated server from which to run and maintain your website, you’ll find that web hosts offer a multitude o...
When you first start looking around for a dedicated server from which to run and maintain your website,
you’ll find that web hosts offer a multitude of different features. One of those might be unlimited domain names or multiple domain names and subdomain names. But why would you want different domain names? There are actually many reasons.
Your domain name of course, is the web address at which people can find you. It looks something like this: www.yourcompany.com. If you want to promote this site and drive traffic to it, which most website owners do, creating different domain names can be a great way to do it, and is necessary if you want to take full advantage of SEO practices.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is just that. When used properly, SEO techniques can increase the traffic on your site by displaying it as one of the top results in the different search engines. There are thousands of SEO techniques that you can employ, but one of the most popular is to create different domain names that point towards your main website.
These can be teaser sites, or just general sites that contain similar information to what’s on your main website. However, they will include links that point back to that main site. Every time someone links to your page, it’s like a vote to the search engines, and it increases your appearance in the search engines. When it’s your website (at the domain name,) you can control how much and how often it links to your main website – so you can include lots of links, get noticed in the search engines, and get more traffic, and customers, to your site!
Another reason businesses might want multiple domain names is if their business is a franchise and they want each franchise to have their own website. Instead of finding hosting for each one, they can all be hosted from the same server, from the same web host.
Subdomains are domains within a larger domain, and if a web host offers multiple domains, they most likely also offer multiple subdomains. With subdomains you can create an entirely different website, but without registering a different name, or paying for the registration of that name. This can be good for businesses that want to push a new product, or have different websites for different departments in their business.
While these sites will be completely separate from the larger domain site, they will still somewhat share a domain name. So a subdomain could appear as: www.support.yourcompany.com, or www.newproducts.yourcompany.com.
When you sign up for a dedicated server, you’ll have all the resources available on that server and so, multiple domain names and subdomain names are often a feature that’s offered by web hosts. Find one that will make these benefits available to you; and then start finding out about all the different ways to take advantage of them!
