Does Domain Extension Or TLD Affect SEO?

When you are looking at trying to increase your website’s performance, one of the major lines of inquiry will always be into improving the ranking in search engines results pages. The way to make that happen and to improve it is, of course, to follow the set of tactics and tricks that come under the umbrella term ‘SEO’, or Search Engine Optimization. But there is a lot to learn about SEO, and most people will find that at least some of it might be a little confusing at first.

One of the questions you might have about SEO is whether domain extension affects how it operates or how successful it is. You might also wonder if TLD affects SEO in the same way, or in any way for that matter. It’s best to know about these things early on so that you can get really close to the truth – as that will help you to approach SEO in a much more successful manner.

Let’s look at this in detail, including a breakdown of just what TLD is and what domain extension is, along with whether these have an impact on your website’s SEO. You might find that knowing about this is very helpful in making your website more popular and more successful in general. So read this article by Link Buildo about does TLD affect SEO.

What Is Domain Extension?

If you don’t already know, the domain extension is actually quite a simple thing. This simply refers to the kind of URL you have for your website. For instance, you might have a .com or a .net or a .us, or any of the many thousands of domain extensions that are currently available. You can even create your own domain extension pretty easily these days, and that can sometimes be an interesting and unique way to set your website apart.

What Is TLD?

So what does TLD refer to? This term stands for Top Level Domain, and it is basically the main domain name around the web at any given time. In other words, the TLDs are those domain extensions that you can consider the major players. There are, as we have seen already above, many different options of these to choose from, but there are only a few that tend to rank well across the world.

Some obvious examples of the kinds of TLDs that rank well globally are .com, .org and .net.

Does Domain Extension Or TLD Affect SEO?

The short answer to this is: no. The domain extension you choose does not affect your website’s SEO in any way, and nor does the TLD that you happen to be using. Google and all other search engines treat all the different TLDs equally, so you are not going to have any distinct benefit if you use .com over .net, for example, or any other example you might care to give.

The domain extension that your website uses and the TLD that it is based on are not going to be picked up in any different way by the search engines, so they can’t be said to affect search engine optimization in any noticeable manner.

However, that doesn’t mean that your choice of domain extension is not going to be important or relevant at all. Even though the SEO itself is not technically going to be changed, there are circumstances in which you might want to be careful about your domain extension and your TLD choices. As it turns out, this is especially true when you are looking at trying to improve your local marketing, which is something that many businesses need to think about when they are trying to boost marketing online.

The Local Effect

The one occasion when choosing a different TLD might make some difference to your website’s visibility is when you are looking at trying to improve your business locally. If you are trying to gain a better visibility in your home country, then you will find a slight boost from using the TLD of that country, such as .us or .co.uk. But even here, the difference is still going to be negligible, so it might not be worth putting all that much effort into, and it’s certainly not worth tipping money onto it.

So What Really Matters?

So if the TLD that you choose doesn’t really matter to SEO, and nor does the domain extension itself, even when the website is a local one, what should you be focusing on? Actually there is part of the URL that does make a difference to the SEO success rates, and it’s your SLD.

What Is SLD?

Your SLD is your Second Level Domain. While the TLD is the ultimate suffix, the .com or whatever it might be, the SLD is the domain name that you normally buy through the regular channels, wherever it is that you personally go to buy your domain name. So it’s your website name before the .com, in other words. And as it happens, this can make a difference to your SEO success.

Choosing The Right SLD

In order to choose the right SLD, you need to think about a few things. First of all, you need to make sure that you are focusing on keywords. This will help with relevance, which can mean that your website is more likely to be seen.

You might also want to make sure that you are using your brand name, or getting as close to it as possible in the domain name. That is going to make for greater visibility and better brand awareness.

Beyond that, make sure that it is relevant, so that people don’t find themselves being unable to find you. And you should also endeavor to keep it short and sweet, so that it is more memorable.

As long as you bear those simple and easy rules in mind, you should be able to choose a much better SLD for your website. That could result in some better website visibility, and improved SEO, even if changing around the TLD and domain extension doesn’t have the same kind of effect.