How to use a free Web host but still have a nice, short URL

By Maria Trombly

There was a discusson recently on one of the National Writers Union listservs about how to get your website to come up in search engines. One problem that some list members faced (including me) was how to make it easier for people to find a page with a long, unwieldy URL.

For example, my Internet cable provider offers me free webspace, but the addresses are very long, and have "~" symbols in them, etc... I wouldn't want anyone to have to type that! So I registered a shorter URL (specifically, industrialwasteland.org ) and had it point to the long one. (It's called forwarding or redirecting.)

That was fine and good, but when I searched for it on Google, Google found both the short and the long URL -- but only the long, nasty one had a title and description to go with it! The problem? The "metatags" describing what the page was about weren't on the redirected or forwarded URL. As far as Google was concerned, the page was blank.

The solution:

I re-registered industrialwasteland.org with an outfit called mydomain.com (this is an unsolicited endorsement, and I'm sure there are other outfits that do the same thing). It cost me $15 (well, the domain was about to expire anyway, so no big deal). Then I went to their "web settings" section and set the title, keywords and description for the webpage by filling in the form. This part was easy.

One problem was that mydomains actually *resells* domains from namesdirect.com (which doesn't offer all these cool features) and I had to register separately at namesdirect (free) and make sure they knew that mydomain.com was taking care of things (a pain, and I had to email for help, but it didn't cost me anything extra and it worked fine).

Now, if you search Google for "industrial wasteland alliance" my site comes up first -- with a title and description!

As a bonus, I got to set up email accounts -- like maria@industrialwasteland.org -- and have them forwarded anywhere I wanted to (like my regular email from my cable internet provider, which is also ugly). I don't know how many email forwardings you can set up at once -- it looks as though you can do at least five or so, judging by the blank spaces on their "email settings" form. I tried it out, and it works (it didn't with my previous domain registrar, even though it was supposed to).

In summary, I guess I'd say that mydomain.com was reasonably cheap, helpful, and very user-friendly when it comes to setting keywords and other metatags and forwarding emails. The initial setup was a bit of a pain, but hey, I only had to do it once.