What is your opinion regarding .me and .name domains - there are still some pretty good domains available - can one name at least one con against promoting them?
It will be real long time when SE will start valuing it. These are just new domain system started recently. Try to promote .com .net .org or at the most .info domains as of now. If you are thinking 10 years down the line, then you may try this new one. But again who knows, New rules of SE might put these domains into new bracket!
I run a .name domain and are at the moment looking at the results will get back to this topic when PR starts.
That´s right. Currently, both may look egocentric for visitors, anyway the perception in the future may change...
From what I have seen .gov & .edu are gold to SE, .com is OK, but .info due to it being sold for a dollar per year, is associated with spam. OK as for .me it is good for some types of names like HELP.ME or CALL.ME that are easy to remember. .NAME is for peoples names and is not currently considered spam. .org use to be good years ago because many organizations were using it, and .net use to be a me too domain name for companies that could not afford the .com extension, but for the long term it is best to pay big bucks and get the .com extension. For example, a company using both MDR.NET & MDR.ORG paid $6,000 got MDR.com and found that soon most of their traffic was coming from the .com domain name even though their brochures still had the old MDR.ORG web address. For a company to look legit, a .com URL is a must.
Seriously? I have a domain analyzer tool that I use to look up good domain names with popular keywords and every single time the edu. extension is always free, it's as if no one seems to want it...
domain extensions dont matter from search engine perspectives but .com being the most popular would be the choice of most of the people. But you dont have to worry about that it has nothing to do with SEO.
I don't think their good at all. The best are .com (of course), .net, and .org. .info's and .us's also arn't as good as the first few I mentioned.
.com is the best choice for US market, followed by .org Users in the US will be looking for a .com, and will regularly type it into the address bar. Everything else is garbage. .edu is only available to accredited schools, just as .gov is only available to govt entities.
All domain names besides .com .net and .org, are much more difficult to get SEO results. If you have a limited budget i would say to go with the 3 main domain names.
In my experience, I have noticed that mostly ".com" are on top # 10 for GOOGLE SERP, However, there are few ".net" too, So, I always go with ".com"
That is because most of the webmasters go for a .com registration so mostly there are .com domains than the other ones thats why you see them mostly in the top 10. However domain extensions has nothing to do with SEO.
Because the .me domains are not made for personal use only - do you think they could be good for commercial start ups??
I wouldn't say "domain extension dont matter from search engine perspective". Generally speaking they do not... but in specific cases they do. Country coded TLDs like .co.uk are automatically assumed to target Google.co.uk and don't naturally rank well in Google.com. Is it possibly to make a domain with a .co.uk TLD rank in Google.com? Possibly, but I'll guarantee you that it will take FAR more inbound links (and those links will need to be from other sites in Google.com) to do so. Last I checked domains with country coded TLDs did not even have the option in Google Webmaster Tools to do Geotargeting because Google automatically set their targeting to the country associated with TLD. But this might have changed recently. I haven't checked in months. Within Google.com all non-country coded TLDs (like .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, etc) are considered equally from an SEO perspective. However, from a user perspective domains with the .com TLD are generally perceived as more legitimate sites. For this reason, domains with the .com TLD have better click-thru-rates in the SERPs and webmasters are more likely to link to them naturally. If trying to rank in Google.com and given the choice, I would ALWAYS go w/ a less desireable .com domain name than a more desireable domain with some other TLD if the desired .com domain name was not available. If trying to rank in a country specific view of Google's index then buy a country coded TLD for that country.
.me is good when you want to create a word like delicio.us did. Think of onlinega.me myga.me pspga.me These might be sweet