Internet Marketing Basics

In choosing a domain name for your future website, you may be wondering what the difference is between ".com", ".org", ".net", ".edu", ".biz", and so on, is. These suffixes are called TLDs - Top Level Domains. Originally, when the (public) Internet was born, there were very few TLDs: .com, .org, .net, .gov, .mil and a few others. The country-level TLDs were added soon after, followed over the years by several other TLDs. Each TLD was supposed to represent a category for a website. For example, .com was originally meant to represent websites for American corporations. Other countries might use something like .co.uk (United Kingdom) or .co.jp (Japan). But things didn't quite work out that way. And in the psyche of the Internet user and the public in general, .com was associated with the Internet. If you didn't have a .com TLD, your site didn't matter. At least that was the attitude.

That attitude is changing, and with so many .com names used up, alternatives have popped up, sometimes costing much less to register. People have also made clever use of older TLDs. For example, .us represents United States websites; however, many people have shied away from country-level TLDs until more recently. The social bookmarking web site http://del.icio.us and several others have made .us popular. More recently, .biz, .name, .tv, and even .ws have become popular.

So what should you choose? The short answer is, stick with .com if you're not sure. But if you are planning on running some sort of media website, consider the charm of a .tv domain. If you can't get the .com you want, consider .biz. If you are running an informational site, try .info. A non-profit organization? Use .org. A technology-related site? The .net TLD is pretty common for Internet Service Providers and other tech-hardware related businesses. Many people who want to somehow register their own name are using the .name TLD. This latter choice actually isn't a bad idea if you run a number of different businesses or services. For example, I might register something like rajdash.name or rajdash.com and run websites such as mathgeek.rajdash.com, consulting.rajdash.com, and so on. (These two website names are called "sub-domains" because the "www" portion is replaced with something else.)

Using your own name in your domain name isn't for everyone. Ultimately, the domain name you choose will be based on three factors: (1) Your business name; (2) Availability of domain names; (3) Your business needs, if you have to use a name variation. For example, as I said in my last post, I had to settle for a variation of my business name. Whatever you do, choose a domain name carefully, as it'll be the moniker with which people will remember you on the Internet. Once you've got a short-list of possible domain names, the next post will show you how to check for availability.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/blogs/netmarketing

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