What Type of Domain Will Best Serve my Online Endeavors?
Posted on Friday, Mar 26, 2010 in "Domain Names"
Determining what kind of domain would best suit your business is usually an easy task if you decide to go ahead and purchase a .com domain like everyone else. However, there are many domain extensions and each one serves it’s purpose. Simply using .com in every situation may not always be your best option, especially if you are going after highly targeted traffic. Aside from focusing on targeted traffic, you might not be able to find a .com domain that is suitable to your business domain, in which case you may have to settle for an alternative domain extension. But how do you know which domain extension to use with your website?
Which Domain Extension is Better Than .com?
This question can be a difficult one to answer, because it depends entirely upon a variety of factors such as what you intend to do with the website, your budget, and other factors such as traffic targeting. If you’re planning on starting a company online, then you’ll actually want to own every extension of your domain. The reason for this is to prevent capitalization by your competitors.
Owning Your Domain Name
There are many competitors that will use nefarious means to steal your traffic by using your popularity, and even your own domain name against you. To do this they will register a domain name that has a different extension than yours, yet the same domain name. For example, if you own examplesite.com, then your competitor may purchase examplesite.net just to steal some of your mistaken traffic. They may even purchase names that contain typos like exmaplesite.com just to trick your visitors into visiting their site when they are trying to type in your site names. If you’re planning on only buying one domain extension, then you’ll want to choose wisely. If you are starting an online business then you can use the .biz extension, although you may be better off using the .com extension. However there are instances when simply using a .com domain would not be your best option.
Using Region Specific Domain Names
Region specific domain names are domain names that pertain to a certain location. An example of a region specific domain name would be examplesite.co.uk. This site extension is meant to show that the site is based in the United Kingdom. Using a domain extension like this would be especially helpful if you were targeting traffic in the United Kingdom. If your site is built around offering a local service, then you would most likely reap the most benefit from using a geographical domain name like the one above.
The beautiful thing about these domains is that you don’t have to actually be based in that area. You can give your site visitors the confidence they need to do business with you and make them believe you are located locally, even though you are located across the world. For example, if you want ed to sell a product that was hot in India, you could open a site with an Indian domain extension to give the impression that you are located in India. This is one way region specific domains are used to attract geo-targeted traffic.
