March 15th, 2010 by Nick

The top level domain (or TLD) of a website’s URL is the bit that goes after the site name- the .com, the .co.uk, the .org, or the .somethingelse. The different top level domains do carry different meanings, and although they aren’t what they used to be- .com for commercial, .org for non-commercial, for example, these little suffixes still carry a lot of information about a website. There are hundreds of different ones around, so we’ll go through a few and list their positive and negative features, for search engine optimization purposes. Some TLDs are open to registration by anybody, but for others you have to prove eligibility.

There is a lot you don’t need to know because it doesn’t relate to search engine optimisation, but we’ll include a little bit of history and background too, just so you get a complete picture. Knowledge is power in SEO!

No doubt about it, .com is the big fish in the TLD pond. Initially it was intended that all commercial websites- not just retailers selling physical goods but everyone making money on the internet- would have a .com domain. However, nobody anticipated just how big or how diverse the web would become, and there are now significant grey areas in what constitutes a commercial website. Certainly, not every who applies for the services of an SEO company sells products directly. Consider a popular blog that generates revenue only from advertising, for example.

Although the commercial/non-commercial classification isn’t so clear cut any more, .com is still the top level domain of choice for most SEO reasons. Having one gives you a head start on your online reputation management because it carries a bit more prestige than anything else. In the domain name registers, the .com is almost always the one that goes before any other. In a competitive field, having www.yourproduct.com implies you got there first and your company is the established authority. Of course, the first .com you think of has probably been taken. But you can always be a little creative and think about your keywords (as always in SEO), and check out some other options.

.org still carries much of its original meaning. It’s generally used for not for profit organizations (like www.icann.org), charities, sport clubs, and the like. If you are selling something or looking to make money from your website in most other ways, it’s best avoided.

The net in .net stands for network, and it’s usage is now similar to .org.  All three TLDs .com, .org, and .net can be registered by anyone and can technically be used for any purpose. For SEO reasons, they aren’t ideal for retailers, though.

Behind .com, the most common choice for commercial websites is a country level TLD. For the Britain, that will look like .co.uk. Unless your services and products are very much restricted to the UK (and the internet is a great way to develop international sales for many businesses), it’s not as good as .com, but it’s still pretty good. Having one won’t get you better priority in search engine result pages, because most measures of location are based on where your site is hosted, not what it’s called. You don’t need to prove any location before registering .co.uk.

Limited domains you probably won’t be eligible for are .gov (government only), .mil (military only), .edu (open to educational institutions like universities), and so on. Sometimes it’s a neat trick to pick a country specific TLD that goes with your site name – the small nation of Tuvalu has .tv as a top level domain, and that has proved very popular indeed.

If in doubt about which TLD to pick, remember that there is nothing stopping you registering more than one and redirecting them to your primary site for the maximum in search engine optimisation benefit.

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