You have worked hard on the Internet for a couple of years to develop a website. Your website has become recognized, and it has high traffic. Suddenly, you find that someone is siphoning off some of your traffic because they have registered a domain name that is very similar to your domain name and people are going to their website by mistake.

If you had planned ahead and registered names similar to your main domain name, you would have defended your main domain name so other people could not take advantage of it.

An example of this is the main website name of www.boomer-ezine.com. A defensive domain name for this is www.boomerezine.com.

Other considerations of this concept are to purchase the domain extensions that can apply to your main site. If the main site is www.boomer-ezine.com, you should consider purchasing the .biz, .org, .info, etc. to protect the main name.

Once you have registered these names, why not use them to direct traffic to your main site and to create links that point to your main sites. We are all aware that the number of links that point to your website are a factor that the search engines use for rating your website.

There are some web hosts that offer unlimited domain name hosting. You can very easily set up one page websites for the defensive name with a message to point the reader to your main site. Here is an example of the message for boomerezine.com:

PERHAPS YOU ARRIVED HERE LOOKING FOR BOOMER-eZine.COM.
IF YOUR BROWSER DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY GO TO BOOMER-eZine.COM IN FIVE SECONDS, PLEASE CLICK HERE.
THANKS!
The PLEASE CLICK HERE link in the message is a link to boomer-ezine.com.

On this redirect page, place links to all of your other websites to create those important links that the search engines love.

In summary, plan ahead on your domain names and purchase the domain names that are close to the main domain name that you are going to use. This will protect your main site in the future when it becomes very popular.

Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.