One the first steps to establishing a brand and marketing your medical practice online is choosing a domain name for your website – i.e. the seomedical in http://www.seomedical.com for example.
But in addition to the name, you need to choose a domain extension as well – or the tail end of a web address where you see the .com, .net, .org, .biz and so on.
In regard to your search engine rankings, .org and .net are weighted the same as a .com extension. Domain names with an .org or .net extension are generally easier to obtain for a much cheaper price than a .com extension.
But .com extensions do have some advantages, mainly web users’ familiarity with that domain extension. If you do not control that version of your domain, you could possibly lose out on what’s known as type-in traffic – web traffic that comes from a user typing their search query directly into their browser’s address bar.
Also, traffic can be bled from your site if you don’t control the .com version of your domain. It won’t affect search engine rankings, but if you think you will be bothered by this loss in traffic, obtain the .com domain name or choose a new one altogether.
Other extensions like .info are very cheap and are used a lot by spammers. Therefore, search engines place little value on them. Other common extensions, .gov and .edu, are reserved exclusively for government agencies and educational institutions.
But links from these sites are extremely valuable!