Before you start creating your mininet you first need to consider domain names. Personally, I use the services of Godaddy. For me this is ‘The Daddy’ for domain purchasing. The domains are cheap and the customer service is great, so why buy from anywhere else?

There has always been a lot of talk online that .com domains will give you a better ranking. That’s not strictly true, it’s the on page factors such as web site content and linking structure which gives your web site a better ranking. Keywords in domains however can bring better rankings. When you main keywords and web site content match the domain it reconfirms to the search engines the topic of your web site. It may also bring you more clicks from search engine placement.

A .com domain is renowned as being the leading extension. When I am looking for a domain I will always spend more time on research just to get the .com extension. It will always hold more value and gives real authority in any market.

If the .com domain I want is unavailable then I will look at hyphens as this will often make the .com available and also makes it clearer to search engine spiders what the theme of my web site is. In many cases, I would rather buy .com domains with hyphens than purchase the .net version without hyphens.

US domains are fine if your business is only targeting the US market and the same goes for .co.uk If your market is global then the .com domain is king! There are other extensions that you will be offered by the domain registrars such as .info, .biz and .org but they do not have the same importance as the .com or .net extensions. If I was geographically targeting a market then I would purchase a domain extension for that country. This way it will be easier to get indexed on their search engines.

Just as a guide I would mark them in this order of importance.

First .com
Second .net
Third .org
Fourth .biz
Fifth .info

It’s worth bearing in mind that any domain extension can rank well on the search engines providing the web site has quality, original content and a good linking structure in place.