Hey everyone at Digital Point, I have been asked to do SEO for my company and have begun to teach myself by reading through hours worth of material today on this website. I was waiting for a response on one I asked in someone else's post, so I figured to have one answered better, I'll ask here. I need a domain for a company whose business is we will say Los Angeles Doctors, but that .com is already taken. Would you buy the .net, .co, .org and use that as the domain or would that be too close to the .com and possibly lose business to the .com since it is the preferred Domain extension?
If you can successfully outrank the '.COM' domain in the search engines then your domain extension is almost irrelevant. I am sure it will be fine. Have you told the other people within your company that the .COM version is taken? See if those people have any input about the names - '.ORG' or '.COM'. That will help you come to a decision easier.
for those who are providing services they should pay more attention to branding. keyword rich domains are more suitable for affiliates i think.
This is a branding question. Figure out a way to get the a .com. The .org will work as well, but a professional business should really use a .com. As far as rankings go, com/net/org doesn't really matter - I've had success with all three.
Use .net only if the .com domain is not popular one or is inactive. If it is then your domain will be neglected. also you'll loose some links (really bad !!). See an example of this Digitalpoint forum. You've registered a .net or .org version of domain. your visitor remembered your site name and want to visit it again but he dont know which extension you've used, so he will search on google and will find all the results for digitalpoint.com coz this site has good PR and has good rank in search results, by this way you are providing visitors to your opponent (the website with .com extension). same will happen when some one is linking to you, If the person is in hurry he will put a .com extension instead of .net . Take example of my site. If my visitor remembered my site name i.e TechnoBombs, very first he will try by using .com extension and visits this - www.technobombs.com/ if he didn't find the site then he will try using .net or .org . So Its recommended to use .com
I have multiple .net domains and they all work great. I would use a .com or .net, Im not a fan of any others
Extension doesn't matter when it comes to ranking. As long as you know how to market your site, you should be fine. It's smart to go after a popular extension for easy remembering when it comes to your visitors wanting to return to your site.
.com is good.. If you are using domain with .com extension then it will help you to get worldwide presence
From the options you have .net and .org are considered TLD (top level domains). Basically it's said that Google ranks .com/.net/.org equally within the search engines. There maybe a few things to consider here though... as mentioned earlier, is the website more for branding purposes? If so I would generally try to stay with the .com however check out the .com site and analyze it... has it built a good presence within the SERP's (search engine results page) already? If not... then going for the .net or .org would be fine and with some well planned Search Engine Optimization you'll be above the .com in no time which puts the shoe on the other foot whereby your company will be taking any potential .com customers You want to be staying away from the .co extension for now. -Jordan
For a physical business you want to try and get a .com purely for business cards etc .org dosent look at professional from an SEO stand point .org .net and .com are treated equally.
.com/.net will not make any differences as far as Ranking concerned. But .com is easy to remember and more acceptable to general people. If you have lost the .com that is a mentionable loss IMO. But if you can do well that loss will automatically be overlooked.