choosing your domain name...
Dot-com or Dot-net?
©2005 by eibhlin morey macintosh
Many people ask me about a dot-com name versus a dot-net.
Here's the bottom line: A dot-com name
can help improve your rankings at some search engines, but the words in your domain name--even if it's a dot-net
or a dot-org--matter far more.
Your site's popularity is more important than its name. Popularity depends upon
content, and links from others' sites.
Keywords can be more important than the domain name, although--as I said--keyword (or words) in your domain
name can make a huge difference.
I maintain several websites. Most of them have dot-com names, but one of my most popular has
a dot-net name:
When I started out with Aisling.net, I had just missed getting
Aisling.com by a couple of months.
In June 2005, if you typed "Aisling" into Google, Aisling.net is the second site
that's listed... after a band called Aisling. They list the word
"Aisling" on their page more than I do, and they probably get a lot of
visitors who type in their band name at Google.
Aisling.com is in the #8 spot.
So, from my experience, a dot-net can be just as good as a dot-com,
but only after you're established. Short term, the dot-com versions
will always come out on top at the search engines.
But, don't forget that you can get the hyphenated version of
multi-word names as dot-coms, when you're buying domain names. They
can list better than a dot-net version.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eibhlin Morey MacIntosh is a published author, writing travel and how-to books and articles. For more FREE
tips like this, see http://www.eibhlin.com/
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