Shorten Your Web Address with a Forwarding Domain

Using a forwarding domain isn't expensive, and the benefits far outweigh the minimal cost of purchasing a domain. Here are just a few ideas of what you can do with your forwarding domain:

Reasons to Use a Forwarding Domain

Shorten your web address (URL) by purchasing a domain and changing the forwarding address to your super-long URL. For example, your website is http://www.thelongesturlontheplanet.com/members/bill, and you'd like to give visitors an easier way to type this in. Purchase anything that relates to your site that people will remember, like shortdomain.com, and your customers won't have a tough time typing it in.

• Easier advertising on business cards, flyers, and on the web


• Better branding for your website/business


• Easier to remember name
  

When using forwarding domains, it's important to remember you really want the search engines to notice the website you are forwarding visitors to, not the actual forwarding domain. For example, if you've created a banner for your website, or if you've linked to your website somewhere on the web, link to the actual website, not the forwarding domain. Here's what the HTML code might look like when you are creating this link:

<a href="http://www.superlongurl/mywebsite/order>www.xyz.com</a>

The point is, you want to direct all of your search engine marketing efforts to link to your actual domain, not the forwarding domain. The forwarding domain is an empty website with a redirect to another page, so telling search engines to visit that page will be telling them to visit an empty page!

So, what you should be linking to is the page itself. Pretend you never had a forwarding domain, and link to that page. The forwarding domain should be used for business cards, promotions, emails, verbal conversations, etc. Online, use the real URL.

You can get low cost forwarding domains through GoDaddy:

There are a number of easy to use, reliable web hosting companies that can allow you to forward a purchased domain to another. Bluehost.com., HostGator.com , GoDaddy.com , and HostMonster.com
are reliable, and very simple to forward.

To forward your domain with any of these companies, log into your new account and click on the account manager/domain manager section. There will be a section for domain forwarding, and you simply type in the URL of the website! Be sure to include the entire URL copied and pasted from your web page.