While choosing a domain name it is important to decide the domain extension and this extension could be anything from .com, .org, .biz, .gov, .edu and more. Each of these extensions refer to a particular group that the website would come to be classified under e.g. .biz would mean a business website, .com stands for commercial (and it is by far the most widely used domain name in the world). Country specific domain names are also becoming very popular especially if the website deals with a product or service that is being offered locally.

Domain extensions do have an effect on SEO in some cases, but this is a heavily debated topic. It is more important to understand what each domain extension means and then decide which would suit your website best.

– .com – This is by far the oldest and most widely used domain extension. .Com stands for commercial and it could mean that the website is associated with some kind of business. .com websites are also widely used by global businesses and by having good content to support your website, you can have the search engines show them up globally.

– ccTLD – Country Code Top Level Domain are the ones that have a country-based extension e.g. co.uk, co.nz. There is no doubt about the fact that ccTLD extensions have an effect on SEO. These domain extensions get preference in search results when the search engines are required to show geographically targeted results. A study has shown that ccTLD has more influence than local language and place of origin of the website. ccTLD is best used when a website is selling a product or service that is targeted at the local market. These domain extensions are more trusted than the rest by the local users but it would not make sense to use this extension if the website is targeting global users.

– .org – This domain extension stands for organization and is usually used by non-profit and charitable organizations. Its algorithm will share a relatively higher importance than .com for specific searches.

– .net – This is one of the other most commonly used domain extensions and it stands for network. This is usually used by network and internet service providers and this extension has no specific effect on search engine rankings.

– .edu – This domain name stands for education and for keywords and searches related to education and educational institutions, search engines rank websites with the .edu extension higher (if all the other factors remain the same).

– .gov – This stands for government websites and these are top level domains owned by the US government. Other countries have domain extensions like gov.uk, gov.in, gov.aus etc. These domain extensions have maximum importance.

– .info and .biz – These two domain extensions refer to information and business respectively. They sometimes rank a little lower than .com websites and people usually choose this extension because of unavailability of domain names in .com

The ultimate truth is that content is king and however much you try to influence your rankings with domain names and extensions, nothing will affect it as much as great content on the website.

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