Has your business considered purchasing a .CO as a shortened alternative to your .COM?  .COM makes up the lions share of all domain registrations, as of January 23rd 2014, .COMs accounted for 112,454,002 of the 148,466,801 domain names registered.

This can make starting a new business and getting a .COM domain name difficult, where as you might have to register a long .COM domain – mynewsportingbusiness.com, you may be able to get mnsb.co and who wouldn’t prefer providing prospective clients a shorter email address, sales@mnsb.co to sales@mynewsportingbusiness.com?

The registry has also sold a handful of single letter .CO domains, the first one sold at auction was e.CO, for $81,000, proceeds going to charity.  Since then t.CO Twitter, o.CO Overstock.com, g.CO Google, a.CO Amazon, y.CO The Yacht Company, x.CO GoDaddy, and a few other single letter registrations have been sold – prices not disclosed.

One challenge .CO has experienced in gaining registrations is compared to some other business related extensions .CO tends to be expensive.  However, with so many options for shorter domain names many businesses are starting to turn to .CO sometimes in conjunction with a longer .COM, but more and more as a stand alone for their company’s website.

While the old belief was that search engines preferred and better ranked the old dogs, .COM, .NET and .ORG, today you see the .CO and .BIZ websites ranking right along at the top when searching for local businesses.  So if that name you really want isn’t available in the .COM, try checking the alternative extensions before buying a name that is less desirable for your business.

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