TLD is an acronym for “Top Level Domain” is the last part of your domain name that is placed after the final “dot”. To speak broadly, a domain consists of two parts, namely, the main domain that comes before the dot and used as site title when you are going to create a website or customise it before getting published and the last part that is actually placed after the ‘dot’. The last part of a domain name is the right most part of it and it is also called Domain Extension or URL Extension or domain suffix. All the domains in the world, of course, consist of a certain type of Top Level Domain(TLD) such as gTLD, ccTLD or sTLD along with the main domains.
Whenever you are going to choose and register a domain, you should know which TLD is best for your would be site, as it, too, has some indirect effects in your site’s SEO, not too much but a little bit.
Pages of Contents:
- Broader Explanation of TLD(Top Level Domain)
- Types of Top Level Domain(TLD)
- Why So Many TLDs?
- Who Manages Top Level Domain(TLD)?
- Does TLD Have Role in SEO?
- 5 Best TLD
Broader Explanation of TLD(Top Level Domain)
Now, you will know the broader explanation of TLD for more clarity regarding it. Every website owner knows how important it is in the field of search engines. However, I am not going to discuss about it now because you will know it in the latter part of this tutorial. Each website contains URL, each URL contains domain name and in each domain name there are three or two parts,namely subdomain, second level domain and third level domain.
As for example, www.blowwager.com is a fully qualified domain that contains these three parts together. The first level is “www” which is a subdomain that you can assign to your domain from your hosting dashboard. The second level is “blowwager“which is the main domain and the most important part of a domain. When you customise your wordpress site from the customise submenu under Appearance, you need to add site title and, as usual,second level of the domain is added as site title. The last part of the domain that is placed after dot(.) is the third level domain, and here it is dot com( .com) which is a kind of Top Level Domain(TLD). During Domain registration, you need to add only the second level and the third level. No need to add ‘www’ as it is a kind of subdomain and you can add this from your hosting provider. The second part and the last part of a domain constitute together a fully qualified domain. Most of the popular websites have popular Top Level Domain(TLD).
Types of Top Level Domain(TLD)
What are the types of Top Level Domain(TLD)? It is a common question that every newbie webmaster should know. Suppose you are going to select and register a domain. Now, what to do? Here, you have to, first of all, choose a good domain( second level domain) along with a popular TLD that suits and best relates to your niche. Let’s go to our main topics, namely types of TLDs. Top Level Domain is generally groped into three types—-gTLD, ccTLD sTLD.
gTLD stands for ‘Generic Top Level Domain’ and it refers to the most recognised domain extensions . In such kind domain extensions, there is no restriction and all kind of users can use these to register with their domains. Examples of gTLD:
- .Com
- .Org
- .Net
- .Info
- Biz
- .Name etc.
Generally, .com is used for commercial websites and .org is used for those sites which are organisational like wordpress.org, icann.org etc. Amazon.com, Flikpart.com, Google.com—–These sites are commercial, so they use .com TLD at the end of domains.
ccTLD stands for ‘Country Code Top Level Domain that indicates a geographical location, country or territory. It consists of ISO code which includes two letters to point out a specific geographical area or country. Some of the ccTLDs are as follows:
- .br—–for Brazil
- .us— for United States
- .uk—- for United Kingdom
- .in—– for India
- .de—-for Germany
- .fr—-for France
- .ca—-for Canada
- .ru—-for Russia
- .nl—-for Netherlands
- .cn—- for China
- .id—- for Indonesia
- .eu—- for European Union
- .vn—- for Vietnam etc.
There are about ~312 ccTLDs recognised by IANA around the world.
sTLD stands for ‘Sponsored Top Level Domain’ and such kind of domains are handled by some private agency or organisations. If you want to register a domain with sTLD, you have to abide by certain rules enacted and supervised by ICANN—A non-profit organisation to manage Domain Name System(DNS) and provide IP Addressing. Some of the recognised sTLDs are given below, such as:
- .asia— for Asia-Pacific based sites.
- .gov— for U.S. governmental sites.
- .mil— for U.S. military.
- .edu— for educational sites.
- .mobi— for mobile products related sites.
Why So Many TLDs?
Why so many TLDs are available there when you are going to sort out a domain in order to register it? Actually, in the early days of web invention, there were not so many Top Level Domains as of now. There were some restrictions, too, in domain registration in some specific cases. But as days gone, technology developed, internet became globalized and users felt the necessity to introduce new domain extensions to match their needs. People started to launch e-commerce sites to sell products and services on a variety of niches. To speak more, in order to perform various works based on various fields, users wanted to use exact niche based domains extensions so as to visitors and customers know the sites and its purpose just by looking at the domain suffix without delving deep into it. So, various businessmen ,organisation, agencies, institutions and applicants urged ICANN to adopt several new TLDs.
ICANN has approved and released about more than 2000 new TLDs since 2014 and they cover a wide range of niches such as:
- technology
- clubs
- hobbies
- science
- geographical location
- accountant
- pizza
- music
- live
- photography
- bike
- cards
- ink
- biz
- shop
- tech
Who Manages Top Level Domain(TLD)?
People all over the world use Internet to carry out online activities. Online sellers sell products through e-commerce sites, advertisers sell ads, buyers purchase products through websites and the rest of the people do several works. To perform these works, there is a need of website and so you should know what is a website? To create a new website you need a domain that is to be registered. Furthermore, users will not be able to connect with or exchange information with you through website until the two connecting devices have IP address. In brief, whatever work you do—Be it domain registration, providing DNS or IP—In each case there is a need of controlling agency. So as a reader, you can ask who manages Top Level Domain(TLD)? ICANN is the non-profit international organisation that enacts rules, enforces it and manages all kind works relating to domain name system and IP addressing. As an applicant, you can apply for a new TLD but whether it will be approved or not matters to ICANN.
Does TLD Have Role in SEO?
You should know whether TLD has role in SEO or not. You have already been familiar with Top Level Domain that it is the last part of a domain and consists of two or more letters. Hence, it needs to pronounced and typed on browsers’s search field if you want to visit a site ending with that extension. As usual, you can guess yourself that an extension consisting of two letters, easy to type an read is more user-friendly than another one which consists of more than two letters, difficult to pronounce and type. Here, the former is more useful to the users than the latter because of usability. This same norm applies for all types of domain suffixes.
Here, as usual, you can further guess that as it relates to user experience, so the better TLD, the better traffic. That’s why .com extension is more popular than all other extensions it is called the king of domain. But keep in mind that domain extension affects user experience only and it has no direct role in SEO. Google also says, ” New gTLDs or brand TLDs are as same as .com or.org in crawling, indexing and ranking”—-It implies that all TLDs are treated equal insofar as technical SEO is concerned.
5 Best TLD
According to IANA there are about more than 1200 Top Level Domain(TLD) and out of these which are best? This list contains many extensions from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. Which are the best TLDs? According to Verisign, as of December 31, 2020 the most registered Top Level Domains are .com, .cn, .tk, .de, .net . In this list .com is the most registered domain extension that amounts to 151.5 million.
- .com contains =151.8 millions extensions
- .cn worth about=24.7 M
- .tk worth about =24.7 M
- .de worth about =16.7 M
- .net worth about =13.4M
However, to users, .com and .org are much popular on account of universal recognition.
