Greetings oh wise gurus of the SEO I am pretty new here...been busting my hump learning, researching,etc etc. I have a question about domains If I can't get "mywebsite.com" is it just as good to get "mywebsite.info" or "mywebsite.org" or...you get the idea. Do the search engines favour one type of domain over another? If so, What would be the best alternate choices if .com is not available? Thanks
Dot com is what everyone wants because of type in traffic. The public in general is not aware of some of the newer extensions. The top three favorites are dot com, dot net, and dot org. For search engine optimization it does not matter but for a serious site I would try for one ot the three extensions mentioned above. Good luck.
Google don't care to much even about keywords in DOmain name Yahoo don't even ... Only MSN cares about keywords in URL/especialy in domain names...
.gov and .edu have the most importance--gives slight ranking advantage .org has more .com, .net, et cetera are typically at the same levels .info is new for me, and im not quite updated with it .ph, .us, .uk give some segmented demographics (geographical location) .com is most commonly used. why? ever wonder how people deem how domain names are typed? well, they usually guess the domain name suffix. best guess is .com since it's one of the pioneering domain suffixes and most sites end up with .com. think about google.com or yahoo.com. know your niche and find the most applicable suffix for your domain name. it doesn't really help much in optimizing your site, but it gives some impression on what your site is all about. for example, should you choose "ecommerce.biz" <- biz stands for business. obviously, you got a business-related site. hope that helps.
All TLDs are equal in the SERPS when it comes to rankings. The only exceptions to this is the local TLDs that get a boost in the local versions of the SERPS