Benefits of .com TLD in Business & Brand Value?

When it comes to the benefits of .com TLD in Business, we need to realize that it is the most commonly used top-level domain (TLD) in the Internet world.

But do you know the complete name of .com?

Probably not, huh?

In this blog, we’d like to briefly look into the history of .com as well as the advantages you’ll get by choosing it for your brands.

A Brief History of .com

The name .com is derived from the name ‘commercial’ because its initial purpose was to register domains for business organizations. Though it was originally developed for representing commercial entities, .com has since been used for almost all types of business and non-business endeavors worldwide.

It was Jonathan Bruce Postel, an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, came up with an organization principle for the Internet. Postel, who was the editor of the request for comment (RFC), with the help of his colleagues published an article titled ‘on the requirements of establishing a new domain in the ARPA-Internet and the DARPA research community’ in October 1984’. And it was the beginning of .com. At first, an abbreviation. “cor” was suggested as the domain for corporations, but later on when the final version came out it was changed into .com.

Earlier, the Internet was mostly used for projects by universities and computer scientists who used the network for research and communication. In line with the mounting popularity of the internet, discovering ways to route messages through gateways manually became a necessity to resolve heavy mail loads and the interruption of connections. A computer manufacturing company in the US called Symbolics, Inc. was the first to claim .com on March 15, 1985.

However, just as in every historical account, there is an opposing viewpoint regarding the origin of .com. Some expert says that it was derived from the name company, rather than commercial. They argue that .com was not thought of as business in the sense of places that consumers go to buy things, but rather they were companies doing government contract work. They also say ‘that the internet was not developed for interconnecting business—It was a military command-and-control prototype network, being built by educational and governmental entities, and contractors.’

So much for the history. It doesn’t make any difference whether .com was initially created for company or commerce. The internet has turned the world upside down and now .com is the most preferred and widely used domain all over the world.

The Significance of .com Today

Today, approximately two-thirds of website domain are registered under.com. Even though they don’t have any technical difference from other domain names, such as .info or.org, the suffix .com bears more brand value than them. Just try to recall some of the websites you know. Doesn’t the majority of them belong to .com domain name?

Benefits of .com TLD in Business and Brand Building

If you are planning to register your brand in a particular domain, we urge you to choose .com suffix following your company name. Obviously, it depends on upon the availability, but obtaining .com domain will help your business a lot in the branding sphere.

All leading brands have .com as their domain extension, though they differ in product or service category and business model. They could have used specific domains like .info, .org and other top-level domains, but they stuck with .com. It amply illustrates how beneficial it is to have this domain as part of your brand URL.

.com and Search Engine Optimization

There are no specific guidelines which domain name will be more suitable for your website, but opting for .com will be your best choice if you are in doubt. And while having industry and location specific domain will be useful for your business, they can’t beat .com in the search engine optimization process.

SEO take into account a lot of factors, such as relevant and quality content, organic keyword placing, link building, the speed of the site and tons of other factors. But studies show that obtaining a .com instead of other domain names can also help you in SEO to a great extent. It’s mainly due to. com’s brandability. In a search engine’s perspective, it looks more authentic, authoritative, and popular than any other option. Nobody can deny the fact that .com is the most memorable term for all of us ever since we start hearing about the Internet.

It is a common misconception that only links and keywords matters in SEO. In fact, Google has a special attraction for brands, and as we said all popular brands have .com as a domain name. So it’s best to keep with .com for your brand URL. And why you should go for other choices if you can follow the industry’s best practices?

Since your website is one of the premium tools of your brand building process, you need to be keen on choosing the right URL for your business. Because your URL is the first aspect that will be shared with any information you provide as a promotion or hard data. Also, linking with the best websites ID is one of the major strategies of SEO. If your website has unusual domain extensions, it could be a turn-off for those who want to link to your website. Domain names other than .com often fail to get recognition by others just because of an unpopular domain suffix. You can appear to be different with a less frequent domain name, but please keep in mind that it might affect your SEO goals in the long run.

Conclusion

Despite being developed to represent commercial or business websites, .com has come a long way over the years as the most popular and recognizable domain name extensions. It now stands for just about anything under the sun. It’s ok if you choose other domains like .net, .org or country specific domains like .ae, .uk, etc. Choose them only if your business is solely focused on specific localities and even more specific audience. Otherwise select .com, which is cheaper than all other domains and more reputable and recognizable than all of them.

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