Since I started on DP, there have been numerous threads, of people usually people quite new to SEO, asking for advice on which domain name extension they should get e.g .com or .net etc. and how domain name affects the rankings of their website. Hopefully in this thread I can clear up exactly which domain extensions are suitable for whatever type of site you have. So far I have searched the forums with various keywords for a thread like this and found none so here goes: Firstly, yes domain names are very important for SEO. If you have a domain name with 1, 2, or even 3 of your main keywords in it, your site will instantly be better off than a competitor that only has a loosly related domain. That clears that up. Now onto domain extensions. Domain name extensions are properly named TLDs -Top Level Domains. Their are two types of TLD, and standard TLD, and a ccTLD - a country code TLD. Standard TLDs are not region specific e.g .com/.net ccTLDs are region specific e.g .us/.in/.uk There are hundreds of different domain name extensions and here I will give a few main ones and tell you where each should be used. If your site is aimed at anyone from anywhere, not from just one region, you should use a standard TLD (something like facebook fits into this category). These are the main TLDs: .com - com as in commerical - for businesses/sites selling something/sites for making money from as its' main purpose .net - net as in internet - these are sites related to technology e.g technology news, tech blogs (sometimes commercial sites related strongly to technology) .org - org as in organisation (I'm pretty sure everyone knew that) - basically for organisations often non-profit ones .biz - biz as in business for sites about businessand money making (not usually for businesses themselves) .mobi - mobi as in mobile phone -for sites targetting mobile phone users (usually with content specific for people viewing the site on a mobile phone) .name - for individuals blogs etc. .info - commonly regarded as spammy sites (though usually not) these domain are aimed at people offering free information in any niche .gov - none of you will ever have to get one (but .gov is for the USA [in birtain we use .gov.uk to distinguish]) (.edu does't fit in here as it is only used in the usa [ in britain we use .ac for ACedemia}) Now, if your site is only aimed at people in a specific region (e.g amazon.co.uk is only aimed at UK customers). These ccTLDs will help your SEO no end if you are only targetting customers by region. Most countries have Sub CCTLDs e.g in britain (the UK version of .com is .co.uk and in france .co.fr or .org.uk or .org.fr). You can get .com, .org, .biz, and .gov in sub country code versions. These can be greatly beneficial to rankings. tohugh, if the extension you want e.g .mobi is not available in a country specific version, then you can use the CCTLD ofr your targetted region. here are a few: .us - USA .GB - Great Britain .in - india .ch - china .fr - france .de - germany For English speakers these ccTLDs are usually very easy to guess I hope this has helped, Josh
Thanks for those pointers. So what about sites like last.fm, headliner.fm, lookbook.nu etc. that are jumping on the ccTLD trend? How are they so successful/becoming successful? I'm interested in changing the name & domain of one of my sites to a 4 letter mexico ccTLD extension (****.mx) but Mexicans aren't my target audience. I'm pretty much below the basic level of a noob when it comes to understanding how ccTLD's operate. So I'm wondering how this will play out with "serps", SEO and all. But I realize that last.FM ( .FM = Domain extension for Micronesia - which are small islands in the western pacific) does the same exact thing I'm looking to do, and is very successful with it (globalizing a local domain extension). Any tips or advice on going about this?