"Domains? I thought I only needed one."

Technically that is correct. But it can be a wise strategy to also register variations of your domain name as well. For instance, you've developed the best cookies ever and you want to sell them on the web. You decide to register the domain ILikeCookies.com. You might also want to register I-Like-Cookies.com. Why? Two reasons.

First, some search engines have been shown to give a slight ranking advantage to domains where the words are separated by a hyphen (-) or an underscore (_).

Second, if your cookie really is that good you can bet someone else will imitate it as fast as they legally can. They could (legally) register the second domain and soon people are confused and you are losing marketshare. That's not good. And it's been done before. So the very small added expense of the extra domain is nothing compared to the lost business and customers.

Depending on what your business is, you might want to consider other variations as well. Such as ILikeCookies.NET. The difference between the .NET and .COM is that they are parallel Top Level Domains (TLDs). Originally, the .COM TLD was supposed to be for Commerce only and the .NET TLD was for networks only. In practice, the guidelines were never followed by many who thought they might gain an advantage on their competition by copying their domain with just the difference of .NET at the end. It's a trick to confuse potential customers, and the search engines too. If the copycat business does better in the search engines then you lose sales. Again, not good.

So, technically, you are right in that you only need one domain to be on the internet. But considering how inexpensive domain name registrations have become, you really might want to consider getting more than one. If the added domain(s) save you just a few sales they will have paid for themselves. Pretty cheap insurance, isn't it?

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