.com .net .whatever which works better

I am wondering if anybody has some advice for getting a decent domain name and whether having a .com .net .info etc.... will affect your ranking in the search engines. By decent domain name I would like to get a one or two words name with less than 10 letters in it without numbers or weird prefix/suffix attached. Just for example say I was going to start a poker site or a poker blog and I want the domain pokerpage.com. Well that one is taken so should I resort to a pokerpage.info or pokerpage.us sort of domain or should I look for a .com listing with different keywords. Also I notice some people with blogs using the .blogspot extension to their domain like pokerpage.blogspot.com ...So in general I am just wondering what other members think with regards to getting a .com or getting relevant keywords in the domain.

 

I don't think blogspot is an extension but is a provider of free blogs.

 

Yeah I have noticed some blogspot blogs with adsense ads and whatnot....so maybe setting up a domain/blog through them would be a good start considering its free?

 

Blogspot is the main domain name and in your example, pokerpage is a subdomain of blogspot. Yup, and Blogspot is Blogger, provider of free blogs.

 

IMO having a .com is still the best.
Reason for this: It's the most popular domain extension.So if you want people to remember your site a .com is the best way to do it.If the domain you've wanted is taken,try to think of another unique and easy to remember domain for your site.

 

I agree Khasmoth, plus there is a shortcut in keyboard that when you type yahoo then press [Ctrl][Enter] will go to www.yahoo.com. So it comes handy. But for search engines, I don't think the differences between com, net or info will matter a lot.

 

I still suggest to for .com domains, better domain extension, and better if your doing a commercial site.

 

Go with a .com or .net as long as your URL is short, easy to understand and makes sense.

 

right now my site is showing up lower in the SERPS then one of my affiliates who runs a .info site. i have seen no correlation to prove that .info, .net, or .whatever will not rank as well in the SERPS.

however i do agree with khasmoth. Most people remmber .com sites the best. so if you are going to make your domain a different site. make sure its catchy so people can remmber and easily return to your site.

ewc21... thanks i never knew the [Ctrl] [Enter] trick. very useful.

 

IMO there is not relationship between SERPS.

However, it help a lot for type-in.

And the best thing to do is the register all the main extension (.com,.net,.org,.us) so you won't loss your visitor because they put the wrong extension

 

It all depends who your target market is. There's no real difference as far as SEO is concerned between a .com and a .net, they'll rank the same in the SERPs. The only difference between the two is the .com is more brandable and you'll lose type in's as most people automatically type this in.

If you're looking for specific country traffic I'd go for the local TLD, it's much easier to get the local domains to rank in the local versions of Google. This is more important no the .com redirects to the local search for most users.

 

It doesn't make any difference to the search engines - they're looking at the content, not the domain. It might be useful to have a couple of keywords in the domain name but I can't see how a .com would be treated differently to a .net by any of the three major crawlers (Google, Yahoo and MSN).

As for region-specific information, I think Google does some of that based on IP address, as I have some UK sites with .com domains that used to be hosted in the US and so didn't appear on google.co.uk, now they're hosted on a UK IP address and they do show up in the UK only results.