choosing your domain name...
Dot-com or Dot-net?

©2005 by eibhlin morey macintosh

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.