With the new influx of Top Level domains surging onto the Internet and on to the market for you to buy and name your site after is it as important to go for the.com suffix as it used to be or are there other options available that are more suitable, that will get your site more easily ranked and found by your visitors? This article will give you all you need to know simply and easily so that you can decide - and the one thing you really need to think about...
The.com stands for commercial and this was one of the first "Top Level Domain" extensions created way back in 1985. However since then there have been various other extensions created such as the .biz (business), .edu (education), .gov (government), .net (network) and the new.co as well as all the separate country suffixes such as .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .ie for Ireland and .com .cn for China.
As these have become more wide-spread and more recognized they have started to dent the popularity of.com and they are slowly becoming accepted by the general population and (more importantly) by search engines alike. The question that arises from all of this is - is it still worth trying to get a.com name for your website or are there better options?
The main reason for using your domain depends on the amount of competition there is in your field and at the moment I have still found it easier to rank.com,.net and.info than I have the others - although that being said you can still rank a.info if the competition is weak.
If the.com is taken (and even if it is not in use and you are waiting to try and purchase it) I would consider looking for a different name to get you underway. I would still always try for the.com (unless of course your business is very specific and localised and you don't plan to market internationally then you should go country specific like .ca, .co .uk, .ie or whatever your local extension is) otherwise I would still recommend going for a .com. unfortunately even now everything else still looks a little like MyBusinessCouldNotFindADotCom.co.uk
Although these do rank well in local geographic searches although they still don't tend to rank as well as .com, .net or.org though (and .coms are the hardest to beat!).
With regards to the fairly new .co suffix, my own opinion is that they haven't really taken off yet and I think a lot of people may think it looks like a typo and so default to the .com. although the domain registrars initially had a field day with this one that seems to have died down now (it's just everyone else that thinks it's a spelling mistake!).
For mobile sites there's still many .mobi ones available and they're not as expensive as they used to be. At the moment (and again this may change) they are tending to get preference when searched from mobile devices - and as the number of mobile devices is rapidly increasing and the number of web searches made by them increasing almost exponentially that may be a domain to think about in the near future.
All in all for ranking and for recognition by people and search engines I don't think that you can beat a.com domain unless you are going to stay very localized - however there is one exception that will always win hands down (in my humble opinion!). Whilst a good.com name is still nice to have it is getting less crucial but one thing that will always remain vital to the success of your business is your business name. The name of your business, product, brand or service is paramount and will remain as important as ever! Don't forego on the name of your business just so you can get a domain to that is available - your name is going to be around a lot longer than the ranking benefits you can get from the suffix you choose.
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