Posts Tagged ‘TLDs’

The TLD Race Has Begun

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Two days ago I wrote that large corporations will soon have an opportunity to purchase a top level domain extension for $185,000.

I’ve recently had a chance to delve into this a little deeper. It seems that ICANNs blog and application for TLDs is a bit clearer on this topic than the original source of my information.

Specifically, I’d like to quote the ICANN blog:

In addition to familiar TLDs such as .com, .org, and .net, Internet users could potentially see new domain name extensions made of almost any word, in any language.

The emphasis in bold text is mine.

I understand the argument that $185,000 is a hefty price and that not everyone will be able to afford it. But … I think an important distinction must be made between gTLDs that are based on domain names and gTLDs that can be based on any word of any language.

The way ICANN has made this ruling implies to me that applications for TLDs will be accepted for any word. That means if several top dog Internet marketers wanted to invest their money together and acquire .seo, then they could present an application. Whether that application was approved by ICANN or not is another story. This understanding of the ICANN ruling opens up many more doors of possibility where gTLDs are concerned. Do you agree?

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Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

Will Brand Domain Names Be A Small Business Opportunity?

Monday, June 20th, 2011

I know Frank Reed says a recent ICANN ruling that will allow large corporations to purchase their own domain name extensions for their brands will only be available for the big guys – small businesses won’t be able to afford it. However, I can see opportunity here for small businesses.

Where there are domain name extensions, there will be domain names. So, for instance, imagine Samsonite applying for one of these branded TLDs and paying the fee. Who will be allowed to have a .samsonite domain name? I’d imagine anyone that Samsonite allows to.

A large corporate brand could conceivably purchase its own domain name and sell domains to anyone willing to pay their fee. So if you sell luggage in your small town department store, what’s to stop you and Samsonite from entering into an agreement for you to have your own domain at yourstore.samsonite? (Under this scenario, by the way, you could also have domains at yourstore.royce and yourstore.travelpro.)

Or imagine this, the city of Dallas, Texas gets its own top level domain extension – .dallas. What if they allowed businesses headquartered there to have their own domain name? A city could conceivably give away those domain names on a first-come, first-serve basis. Or they could sell them and put the revenue into developing city infrastructure. The sky’s the limit, right?

I can imagine this scenario, however, there is one big challenge – a major hurdle, if you will. How can these domains be search engine optimized, or can they? How will search engines adapt their own search algorithms to make those domains more searchable, or will they bother?

Of course, .dallas could have its own search feature so Google’s search recognition may not be necessary. However, I’m curious what the nature of search would look like with thousands, possibly millions, of legitimate, ICANN-recognized TLDs. What do you think?

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »

Andy Beal’s Heavy Weight Support For Minor TLDs

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Andy Beal is one of the most well known and respected Internet marketers in the world today. The owner of Marketing Pilgrim, he is also a recognized expert on reputation management. He recently wrote that he purchased a dot ME domain name. Specifically, reputation.me.

This is important for a number of reasons, but primarily it says that domain name extensions don’t really matter for rankings. Now, Beal hasn’t proven that with a high Google ranking yet, and he may never, but the fact that he is willing to endorse the .ME domain says a lot. He says as much in his own words:

In the meantime, Reputation Dot Me serves two purposes:

1. Provide anyone with a constant stream of online reputation management data.
2. Shows how easy it is to put a $20 domain name to work–even a .ME one! :-)

If it’s so easy to make a lower-level domain name extension work for you then why aren’t more people doing it? Everyone seems to be so interested in dot com and dot org. Not much else.

I think it stems from a misunderstanding. Most high ranking websites are either dot com or dot org. That leads some people to believe that you have to be a dot com or dot org to rank well, but that’s a myth. The reasons so many dot coms and dot orgs do well in the search engines are:

  1. They’ve been around longer than most TLDs
  2. Optimization practices were set on .coms and .orgs
  3. Widespread community support for the major TLDs
  4. A misunderstanding of SEO tactics related to TLDs

I think it is more important to have your primary keyword in your domain name, no matter what the TLD is, than it is to have a specific TLD extension. I also believe that it is just a matter of time before a minor TLD achieves high rankings in Google for important keywords often enough that the myth will be busted by best practices alone. You can high rankings for minor TLDs in Yahoo! and MSN a lot quicker than you can in Google, but I think Google is realizing that they can’t put a fence around minor TLDs forever. Eventually, they’ll have to let in some minor TLDs and established and influential folks like Andy Beal taking a chance on them will be the reason why.

Learn more about SEO best practices.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »