Choosing domain name extensions
19/05/2010
In the UK there are only 2 extensions to consider for most businesses, the .co.uk and the .com. A business marketing only to the UK should use the .co.uk and point the .com to the .co.uk website. Businesses marketing outside the UK or businesses which want to give the impression of being larger should use the .com version and point the .co.uk to this.
Charities and not for profit organisations also have the choice of .org.uk and org.
Businesses in the Internet industry could also consider the .net domain name and there are a few others such as .tv for TV type websites.
The .biz name does not give much confidence and generally best avoided.
The .eu domain is generally poor. For marketing into Europe use .com or multiple domains with the country extension. Many of the other new domains are also weak, having been bought up by speculators and spammers and the search engines treat them with suspicion.
Domain name extensions and TLDs
The above talks about domain name extensions as this is the common name, but the correct name for these are TLDs (Top Level Domains) in the case of .com, .org, .net and .biz. Then there are ccTLDs which are county code Top Level Domains and these include .uk or .fr or .de or .za or .ie . Each country then sorts out the domains beneath these, with different systems being used throughout the world.
