Missed out on a .com name!

Hi all,

Please excuse me if this question has been asked already, but I'm a newbie so bear with me.

Basically my question is this, I'm in the process of building a small networking site and I have a site name in mind, but the .com name has already been taken.

Having spent weeks going through the usual word jumbles and made up names I find that the my original site name does everything I need, and I can get all the other abbreviations, just not the .com.

Does having the .com matter anymore, and can a site which may grow in size, afford to go with a .co.uk or an .org?

Thanks in advance for your help, and once again sorry if this post is in the wrong place.

Cheers, Bazza.

PS. I can get the .com if I place a dash midway through the site name, but this tends to spoil the name's lyrical focus...what do you advise?

hi, use the .net extension

If you're asking for purely optimisation purposes, then any of the TLD extensions (.net, .org, .info, .biz, etc) will serve exactly the same purpose as a .com. Search engines don't discriminate against any domains like that. You can get a slight small helping hand if you have a localised site and you have a localised domain, like a site about events in the UK with a .co.uk domain. this isn't that much, but if you're going for something slightly targeted it's a good idea.

The only issue with a .com domain is that people will remember it easier then a .net or anything else. The real issue is how easily people are going to remember it so they can come back another time.

For a networking site, I think .net extension is good choice as suggested by gopal345.

I agree with this entirely...the actual domain name means nothing to the search engines etc...

Agree with the above, the domain name doesn't matter for search engine optimisation.

The .com might be easier for people to remember if you are targeting outside the UK but I guess you have to balance out the benefits of keeping the name and changing the domain extension or vice versa.

The hyphen in the name might actually help SEO if the words separated are keywords, however im not sure whether this will go against people remembering the name.

Good Luck

For a UK site a .co.uk is much much better.

Users will automatically type .co.uk so if you own the com but not .co.uk you will lose traffic.

Secondly the search engines love local domains, hosted locally. So for a UK search, targetting the UK market go for a .co.uk every time (and make sure the servers are hosted in the UK too).