Sunday, December 23, 2007

Choosing A Website Domain Name Part 1 Top Level Domain Name

Choosing A Website Domain Name: Part 1
Top Level Domain Name

The first stage of choosing a domain name is deciding on the Top Level Domain Name or as you commonly see it written - TLD. This involves  deciding on whether you will use a generic or non geographic  TLD like .com, .net ...or a geographic TLD like .uk, .de.

When choosing a TLD you will be choosing from existing standard names. You cannot make up your own TLDs -see Top Level domain names  for more details.

There are 2 to 3 stages involved in choosing a domain name:

  1. Select TLD like .com or .uk
  2. Select 2nd level like .co,.gov -- only if using .uk or similar for TLD
  3. Select website domain name like IBM, Microsoft etc

Choosing the Top Level Domain (TLD) Extensions

For businesses the most obvious choice and the preferred one is a .com domain name. For example, assume you wanted to use JUICE as part of your domain name then you would try to register juice.com but it was already taken then juice.biz would be a logical alternative.

However ,before using an alternative to .com most businesses look for alternative names like fruit-juice.com and only use the .biz,.net or .org alternative TLDs when there are no other logical alternatives.

If you do not need to attract customers from outside your own country or you are offering something country specific then a geographic domain name is the best choice.

 For example a Website specialising in Fruit Juice for the UK market would use an .uk TLD. If however, your Website were to offer Fruit Juice in many countries then you would choose a non-geographic like .com.

Country/Geographic Domain Names (.uk, .de etc)

If you are specifically focused on a particular country then always use a country TLD. Almost all search engines currently give a weighting to local content and are expected to attach more weight in the future as local search becomes more popular.

This means that a search engine would give .uk websites preference for a search on 'website services' from a browser (user) in the UK. Therefore if you are servicing/selling predominately to the uk market then your TLD should indicate that.

Second Level Names For Geographic TLDs

 However, if you use a geographic TLD like .uk then the second level represents an area. The most common second level UK name is .co.uk (UK  equivalent to .com) . Other choices are available like:

See http://www.nic.uk/ for more details

Your Website Domain Name

Taking into consideration the extra level for geographic domain names then the general domain name format becomes:

www.mywebsite.com or www.mywebsite.co.uk

Where I've highlighted the effective Top Level domain name - TLD.

Here we are going to choose the second level of the domain name- in our illustration the mywebsite  name. For this part of the name you have full control, as you make it up yourself. Your only restriction being that it has not already been taken. We will consider the options in Choosing a Domain Name- Part 2.

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1 comment:

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