What's in a domain name?

A number of our customers often question us as to the importance of their domain name choice, and what impact the choice of Top Level Domain (TLD) makes. The simple answer is to do with search engines, in that those on the corresponding TLD are likely to display a correlating domain higher in the results; so for instance if someone is searching on Google.co.uk, then it makes best sense to have a .co.uk TLD - meaning a glocalized policy is usually recommended. Historically there have only been around 20 or so general use TLDs / generic TLDs (gTLD) - i.e. not country specific. The most common of these is the .com TLD which is still the pre-eminent International business domain / address. If you are setting up an International / global company, the recommendation has always been to utilise the .com in your domain; if the business is targeted locally, then a county domain is preferable; if it is a charity or not-for profit organisation then .org etc.. Google’s glocalized strategy is typically a benchmark for how best to approach a full-strength International presence, but this is expensive to maintain and takes considerable personnel resources. Evolving search engine behaviour also means that it does not necessarily serve you to have several domains pointing at the same website - you will simply water-down and weaken your SEO; it would seem that in most cases, a single, relevant, targeted domain would be the best choice.

To further confuse matters, ICANN - the top level domain authority has relatively recently announced that it will permit 300-1000 new General Top Level Domains to be created each year. Higher level domain registrars can make an application for a new gTLD by laying down a $185,000 evaluation / application fee and filling in the supposed several hundred page form of supporting documentation. It is believed that .film / .movie and .music will potentially be heavily contested, but all should bear in mind that the last ’big’ new gTLD ’.mobi’ has achieved only really moderate success with circa 1 Million registrations on that domain to date.

There has also been talk of some coporations purchasing their own trademarked names as a gTLD, but it would be most unlikely that ICANN would grant a licence for such a purpose, and the application process is not open to all and sundry - merely the usual high-level domain registrars and associated organizations.

ICANN will be accepting applications for the first batch of new gTLDs from January to April 2012 and advises that the evaluation process would take 9 to 20 months. For the average company, this will have minimal effect; in any case the Internet is changing and evolving of its own accord; it is likely that domains will play a lesser role in how we access sites in the future, as we daisy-chain via mobile applications through social hubs / aggregators and URL shorteners. For SEO, I still believe the glocalized model will stand muster for a few years yet; one of the key rules with a domain is memorability and recall. As ’.com’ is the most common domain - when I am searching for a company’s or organisation’s website first, I often just type in the company name followed by the .com domain; I then work through the country denominations if the Search Engine route has proven unsuccessful.

When we created the ’Comrz’ name, we wanted something short and phonetically memorable, which could be easily typed into browsers for potential customers to get to us quickly. The longer the domain name, the more potential for typos / the more difficult the name is to remember. There is a whole other subject on domain names and SEO / taxonomy reinforcement, but this tends to use generic words which you can strengthen through content repetition of same keywords - this does not always dove-tail into a unique, memorable brand identifier though, so we will save that subject for a later time. It suffices to say that for many companies the URL / domain consideratios are key to the brand naming process.

In the meantime you can peruse the relevant impact / saturation of some of the key TLDs, as well as some of the most significant URL Shortener domains used today. Note that there usually does seem to be a distinct advantage in the minimal number of characters in the TLD and domain name!


Total Active Domains per TLD (rounded to nearest Million)

.com = 96 Million
.net = 14 Million
.org = 9 Million
.info = 8 Million
.co.uk = 7 Million
.biz = 2 Million
.us = 2 Million
.mobi = 1 Million

Evolving Leading URL Shorteners (getting shorter!)

tinyurl.com
bit.ly
goo.gl
t.co