Choosing a Top-Level Domain: .com, .net, .org, or something else?

Let’s say you’ve come up with a great new website name. It’s catchy and unique and you’re lucky because no one has registered it yet.

The only question now is what top-level domain (TLD) extension should you get? .com? .us? .info? There are a few hundred TLDs to choose from so how do you pick?

It’s always a good practice (if you don’t mind spending $35/year) to purchase the .com, .org, and .net extensions of your domain name – especially if you plan on building a large brand on the internet. Most of the major search engines give a lot of value to these three extensions when it comes to "exact match" searches.

Let’s say you own Example.com but you didn’t bother buying Example.net. Well someone could go and buy Example.net and just park the page or he or she could rank for your brand name or product. An example of someone else buying up a branded name is Twitter.ca. If you type in Twitter.ca you will not go to the Twitter service that you normally use – instead there is landing page.

Getting Your Local Business Found in Search Engines

Many local businesses around the world are looking to the search engines to help find customers.

The following steps will help these businesses increase the number of visitors to their website and therefore find new customers:

1) Get listed in the Google Local Directory

Google is the biggest player in the search world. When you use Google to search something like "eye doctor New York" or "dentist Fargo" there is typically a top 10 listing of results for local businesses at the top of the page.

Having your local business listed here is the cheapest and easiest way to attract new customers. You can sign up for the Google Local Directory here: www.google.com/local/add. It only takes a few minutes and it’s quite a simple process.

If you’re a bit more web savvy, David Mihm has a very thorough post on increasing your ranking for local listings.

2) Build a great website

What is the purpose of your website?

My guess is that you want more customers to contact you – therefore you should make sure that your contact information is very prominent throughout your website.