When selecting a domain name for your web site it's important to make a good choice already from the beginning since it's hard to change the name later. It's of course possible to change domain name for a web site, but it requires a lot of hard work and you should expect to lose some income in that process so it's so much better to do it right from the beginning.

I've seen many newbies asking questions in forums like "what's the best TLD (top level domain) for my website to get a good ranking in the search engines?". If you ask me that's of secondary importance since you need to create your web site or blog for humans, search engines will find your site anyway.

When most people search for a company they just type in [company name].com in their web browser so therefore if you can get your hand on the .com domain it's always the best. You can of course in those cases also register
the .net and the .org to protect them from competitors, or to set-up similar sites as your .com site with a different angle.

If the .com domain is already take you could use .net or .org if it's a good domain, otherwise try to find some other .com domain to register instead. In some rare cases the .net or .org domain could be to prefer over the .com TLD, for example for tech companies the .net would be a great option (combined with the .com if available).

The idea behind several TLDs is to have one TLD for different types of organizations. In the beginning the idea was to use .com for companies, .net for ISP and technical companies and .org for non-profit organizations. Today nobody really cares about this, but I think it's a good idea to know why several TLDs where set-up originally.

Back to the search engines. They will mainly look at your content and keywords found on your site and not on the TLD. In some rare cases your site may get a lower ranking because of the TLD, but that's just for TLDs known to be used by spammers and scammers.

So the conclusion is to go for .com if possible since it's easier for your visitors to remember and focus your main energy to create a good site for your visitors. Search engines will find you anyway.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Domain names, The World According to Xavier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.