Minor TLD’s in Domain Name?

What do you think is the scope of minor TLD’s against the heavy weights like .com or .org? I was pondering about the future of minor or new TLD’s like the new .ME or ccTLD’s like .ca, .uk or .in and have this to say

Search Engine Perspective
a. If you search for anything as of date, chances of a .org or .com to fill up first 10 results are high. Well, it is because .com and .org’s have been around for long, and hence get an additional advantage of ranking well for some keywords. That however doesn’t mean that if you purchase a new .com today, it would show up in first 10 results. Search for any keyword or pharse and even the last set of results would have plenty of .com’s lined up on 100th page of search result.

b.  Sites that started early, had limited competition, got indexed and got backlinks without any effort. Do you remember how many times you propagated web sites yourself in emails sending reference about article you read, games you played or the new phenomenon of blogs! So, sites that have been around for long got BIG advantage of age with minimal search engine optimization.  Now for a new site you have to have a marketing strategy, work to get back links, at times with cost associated to get a backlink apart from normal search engine optimization of content.

Search Engines are Changing!!!
This should make you happy for sure. Have you noticed that you get redirected when you enter Google.com in address bar? if you type in Google.com in address bar, you are most probably going to get results from Google.(ccTLD) instead of Google.com, thus someone in India would get results from Google.co.in and someone in Canada is served from Google.ca. Google.co.uk gives results to folks in England and Google.pk is used to serve people in Pakistan. Does that help? Yes indeed. You can compare results between .com and ccTLD to notice that you are invariably shown up more results from your country and thus Search Engines are in a way promoting all ccTLD’s at least within geographic regions. While you may rank #1 in Google.co.uk, you may end up on 10th page on Google.com and the reverse is also possible.

What drives traffic to your site?
Search Engines do drive traffic to your site to a certain extent, but in the end, it’s the People who make a site popular. Thus, just by optimizing your site for spiders, bots and crawlers will not be the most effective strategy. Focus more on The People visiting your site and rest all would fall in place.

Advantage Minor TLD’s
Final word, you may no longer get a KEYWORD.com for yourself, but, you can still be lucky to get KEYWORD.ccTLD and KEYWORD is lot more important in domain name then the ignorable TLD. ccTLD’s give you an excellent option to own a keyword rich domain name with minimum expense, and there is nothing that could prevent your site from becoming popular even if it doesn’t end with .com. de.li.cio.us is one such sample for all of .US (pun intended). Recent surge for .ME is just an indication that things are about to change and .com and .org would no longer be the ONLY one to rule.

Make Way for .ME as I come .IN To Take .US to the TOP

As of now, there are overwhelming ccTLD’s as compared to gTLD’s, it is fairly easy to procure a ccTLD just as you would go out to buy a .com and I believe it is time to ignore the major TLD’s and go for Minor TLD’s and focus more on content then TLD.

Do let me know what you think of all this? I would like to get your opinion and views.

Resources

• Register .ME Today
• Where to Register .IN?

Thanks & Best Wishes,
Pubdomains.com – Domain Registration & Web Hosting Services