Tips for selecting the perfect TLD

TLDs are top level domains and refer to the suffixes at the end of a domain name, for example, .com, .org, and .net. Some other popular TLDs such as .edu or .gov are only allowed for educational and governmental institutions. Most webmasters use the .com, .org, or .net extensions to build their websites and promote their businesses online.

If you are about to choose your own TLD for your own business, .com may be the first thing that comes to your mind. The .com TLDs are fairly common and most people tend to consider .com as the last suffix to your web address when they type it into their URL bars. There may be an issue of trustworthiness, however, that you may want to think about as .com domains are easy to register by spammers and there is no restriction on the information that can be put there.

The .org TLD is right for you if you want people to trust your website for information about authoritative topics. Although it can be registered for commercial as well as non-profit ventures, most Internet browsers consider this domain as a non-commercial TLD.

A .net TLD, on the other hand, has a range of options available and you can easily choose the address of your choice. There are often sales on .com, .net and .org domains, and there are more of these non-country-specific domains to choose from such as .ws, .cc, .co and .biz. However, they are far less popular.

There is one more choice that you may want to consider for building your corporate identity and that is to have specialized TLD. So, you can have .mcdonalds as your TLD rather than a .com or .net. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN is now providing this choice for getting your own TLD in the name of your own institution.

The registration for such TLDs is only for established corporations and organizations as of now and provides an interesting opportunity for them to have a domain name that is unique to their own organization. It is, of course, a possible boon for SEO since sites like Google and Yahoo may rank websites with such TLDs nearer the top of their results for that specific company.

The cost is a factor that may put you off getting your own specialized TLD rather than a .com or .net. It costs around $200,000 just for applying for this specialized TLD. Trademark contravention is something that also needs to be considered since it remains to be seen how ICANN actually prevents someone else registering a TLD in your corporation’s name.

A carefully chosen TLD may play a key role in optimizing your website for the search engines. So, give as much attention to it as you do to your web address.