what’s the difference between .com domain name and .com.sg domain name? which should i go for? very often i’m asked this question.
well, technically, they work exactly the same way. ftp, email, web pages, scripts, dns… there’s no difference in how a web site is run no matter what domain name it is.
however, you may prefer one over the other for some reason:
1)price is different, very different. cost of .com .net .org domains is US$7-15, while .com.sg domain name costs S$60-80. so if there’s no special reason, stick with .com names, it won’t hurt most likely.
2)where is your target market? unless you want really strong local identity, .com domain name is generally acceptable. if you run a shopping mall, or yours is neighbourhood community web site, you may want .sg domain names as people can tell immediately who you are.
3)you are singapore branch of an international company? then you may want to register .com.sg domain and put localized content.
4)short, crispy .com version domain is taken while .com.sg name is still available. nowadays almost all the short, eye catching, 1 or 2 word .com domain names are taken by someone, it’s really hard to get a good .com name. however, there are still many good .com.sg names available.
5).com domain name is open to anyone, .com.sg is available to singapore registered companies only.
the same applies to .net .org and other country domain names.
Domain names are more important for SEO than ever today (October 05, 2006). The reason is that search engines have had to discount more and more on-page factors due to webmasters and their SEO efforts to get top ranking.
With less factors to rank webpages with, search engines are looking for other things to base a website rank in their search results. In-bound links were what made Google what it is today, but even they are discounted now due to webmasters linking to everything they can find to increase their PageRank. But that is another story.
Domain names are the one on-page factor that is hard to cheat on. After all, how many top level domains can a site have?
MSN understands this and ranks a website with a keyword phrase within the domain name well ahead of other sites. For example, I registered a domain name (american-pitbulls.us) for a pitbull site and setup a blog about six months ago. Three months later I did a search on MSN for ‘american pitbulls’ and my blog came up #1! (Page 1 of 70,571 results)
Keep these factors in mind… The site had:
No PageRank
A new domain name, 3 months old then
No links
No SEO – a WordPress Blog
The blog is still at #1 on MSN today ahead of all 70k sites. Feel free to check yourself, AdSense…
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=american+pitbulls&FORM=MSNH
The full url is http://american-pitbulls.us/wp
I’m getting traffic from Google as well now. Anyway, you can see how important the domain name is in ranking well in MSN. Even at third in the search engine wars, MSN can push out a lot of traffic.
Robert McCulloch
http://attorney-blogs.info/