(Newswire.net — March 23, 2016) — To dot com, or not com, that is the question. At least it will be in the near future, with what could be a revolution in the way companies stake their claims online. When you approach a web hosting company now you can expect to be offered a lot more choice than before when it comes to selecting a domain name. If you look at UK2 domain names for instance, you see a long list of new extensions available, from .cloud to .london that may seem a little strange, given the prevalence of .coms and .co.uks, but actually make a lot of sense. Here’s why your business ought to consider going the not com route next time it needs a domain.
First off – what actually are not coms?
If we think of a domain name as your address online, then not coms are like new-build properties. Maybe it’s going to be a great new home for your business, maybe it’s going to be an investment for the future. Most of us, when registering a domain name, will naturally look straightaway for the .com or the .co.uk, and will almost certainly be disappointed that it’s already taken. By this year however there will be more than 1,300 new domain name suffix options available, everything from the examples given above to .biz to .blackfriday to .rocks. This is a major expansion of web territory, and while some businesses may feel that it’s too risky a proposition and prefer to continue hunting for a suitable .com or to buy it from someone who already holds what they want, others will consider that it’s a risk worth taking, and so the trail will be blazed.
So why do we need not coms?
Here’s an interesting little factoid – the very first domain to be registered, on March 15th 1985, is still around today, and now there are around 120 million other dot coms, making up the vast majority of the approximately 275 million active domain names in existence. What that means is that if you start a company today then in all likelihood your preferred dot com domain will already be taken, and so many businesses are forced to either choose overlong or inadequate addresses, or pay a lot of money to buy what they want from the current owner. This overcrowding is thought by some experts to be holding back internet expansion and thereby economic growth.
How will a not com benefit your business?
Let’s say that you open an ecommerce store that specialises in offering cheap deals on well-known brands. You might look at a domain name of .deals, so your site is (brandname).deals. It immediately helps people to understand what your company is all about – good deals. Because relatively few brands will have that suffix so far, you have plenty of scope to choose a snappy, memorable name for the website.
Not coms are brilliant for protecting your brand identity of course – some big companies such as Apple are paying thousands to register their domains. But they can also be necessary to protect your customers. If someone sets up a fake website at a not com using your brand name, they can use it for phishing attacks, collecting sensitive data from people who believe it’s a legitimate site. You need to stay on top of this kind of threat, and others to your brand reputation, by securing the most common domain names.
Something else that’s worth bearing in mind is that a not com could help with your search engine optimisation. If your domain name suffix is industry or location specific, then Google’s spiders could rank it higher. That’s not proven of course, and it’s recommended that your website content is fully-optimised anyway to let the spiders know what you do exactly and where you are, but as they say, every little helps.