A couple of month ago I have written about the basics on how to choose a domain name. Today let me add one important point.

A friend of mine runs a successful business and just has launched a new website with some great tips for lead generation. I wanted to read one of his articles again and typed-in his URL. Instead of his homepage I saw:

Error: Server not found

This was quite a surprise. He has one of those domains where you have a hard time to remember whether to add the “s” for plural or not. Like in

car.com or
cars.com

The weird mess up on his part is that he even has a very beautiful logo with …labs, but his domain name is …lab.com.

I don’t think I am the only one making this mistake, but I am one of the few who actually try the other version as well. The average web surfer might just give up right away.

Of course I wrote to him immediately and shouted,

There is a huge debate about which domain extension to use. Internet marketers usually have a different opinion than registrars who want to sell the most exotic domain extensions like .BIZ .TV .ME .NAME and so forth for a nice profit. Here is my answer to to that discussion.

The short answer: .COM is recognizable as Internet domain by the largest group of people when compared to the wide-spread of other generic top level domain extensions (gTLD) like: .NET .ORG .EDU or .GOV

When you say, MyBrand.COM, almost everybody will know instantly that you are talking about your Internet domain and they will associate it with a website as well.

.COM is definitely the strongest brand among all top level domains

As the domain name space has filled up rather quickly new gTLD were invented for use by businesses worldwide: .BIZ .INFO

And as I have read today the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN.org, which is the governing body of the Internet, plans to introduce hundreds of new top level domains.