.com, .home, .house, .estate. Setting up website- domain to chose

[Aaron N.]

We all love .com but it seem that these other domains are just starting up.  I heard that if you use a domain like .forsale, then your site will be higher on google or zillow.  Anyone have any thoughts.  For me I think my website will be mainly on links, cards, flyers so I am ok not having a .com and prefer to be higher on the google searches.

[Paul Ewing]

I used to do a fair amount of website development for small businesses and followed to industry.  My opinion and that of most dealing with small businesses is that if you intend to get a sizable portion of your business from people typing the address in from some offline advertising source you need to go (at least in the US) with .com if at all possible and .net as a fairly far down second choice for an extension.  If you are a club or group, .org is a possibility.  All the other extensions are marketing junk that the general public isn't really used to.  In some cases they are penalized by the search engines because they are the domains of spammers.