Supposing you want to protect your brand and catch all the traffic that's meant for you by registering several versions of your domain name: mywebsite.com, mywebsite.co.uk, mywbesite.com, and so on. If mywebsite.com is your primary domain name, you can make all of your Domain Names redirect to your primary address. Most registrars, including DomainMonster.com, can help you set up domain forwarding. In this case, if someone typed mywbesite.com, you would probably want mywebsite.com to appear in the address bar when they arrive at your website. This is called "uncloaked" web forwarding.

If you are using free hosting for your website, so that your domain name is something like http://mywebsite.freehosting.com/, you could buy mywebsite.com and use "cloaked" web forwarding to make that domain name redirect to your website. When your visitors arrive at your site, they won't see your ugly, affiliated domain name; they'll see your own domain, mywebsite.com. Again, your registrar should be able to set up cloaked web forwarding for you.

Having multiple domain names might also be useful if you have several subdomains on your primary website. For example, you might have different language sites, such as uk.mywebsite.com, fr.mywebsite.com and so on. In this case, you could have mywebsite.co.uk redirecting to your English language site and mywebsite.fr to your French language site. Yahoo! does exactly this: try typing www.yahoo.co.uk into your web browser.

If you've subdivided your website into sections using subdomains, you might also use mywebsiteshop.com for your shopping subdomain and mywebsiteblog.com for your journal section. Using web forwarding in this way can be a lot less hassle and far less time-consuming than running several entirely separate sites with different domain names.

By Natalie Catchpole