Domain Extensions

What is a domain extension? A domain extension is the suffix at the end of a web address that specifies an internet category and/or the country code of the location the domain is from. The domain extension you select has a much more important role than you might think. Choosing a recognizable domain extension could help with your online business branding. Let’s explore which extension you should get for your new domain.

.BIZ (businesses but all uses) .CAT (Catalan linguistic & cultural community) .COM (commerce but unrestricted/all uses) .COOP (cooperatives), .EDU (post-secondary educational institutions) .GOV (government of US) .INFO (informational sites but unrestricted/all uses) .INT (international organizations established by treaty) .JOBS (employment-related sites) .MIL (US military) .MOBI (mobile uses) .MUSEUM (museums) .NAME (individuals) .NET (networks but unrestricted/all uses) .ORG (organizations but unrestricted/all uses) .PRO (professions like legal, medical) .TEL (online directory or contact information) .TRAVEL (travel industry) .XYZ (An open extension available for general use)

TLDs can serve as a simple way of understanding what a website is used for or whereabouts in the world it’s based. For example, the .uk in nominet.uk tells you that Nominet is a company based in the United Kingdom. Or if you see a website using a .gov TLD, you’ll know it’s related to government.

Does domain extensions affect SEO? As the survey above stated that domain extension has a low effect on your SEO, the real impact of TLD is not sure yet. But here is what we know: • The choice of TLD is pretty wide, from extensions dedicated to countries, to ones for industry areas or catchy ones (like .pizza for instance!) • Site quality is still the first ranking factor and domain extensions won’t have any chance to be more important • Country extensions can be a smart choice if you are developing your business only in this country. It can favor your SEO strategy • Google has once again confirmed that the new domain extensions will offer no ranking advantage over traditional .com or .org domains. But let’s think it can have an indirect influence as we will see below • Moz study shows that .org extension works better than those like .edu or .biz and slightly higher than .com

Google favors better search results By adding new domain extensions, Google shows user experience is still one of its first preoccupations. Let’s see what this might mean: Some new TLDs are more expensive. This means spammy websites will be less likely to use these extensions to throw their hacks. So websites owning these extensions may rank better in trust. It exists verified domain extensions such as .archi or .gov. It could seem fair to rank higher these websites since they are verified. Even if keywords placed before or after the dot have no influence on rankings, they do have one on user perception. It provides informations, relevance and trust. As a matter of fact, if a website gets more visits thanks to its domain name keywords, it will rank better at the end. This applies especially for specialized websites like .jewellery, .news, .scubadiving, etc or location domain like .paris, .berlin, etc.

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