.tel Extensions and SEO
There are two oposite opinions about increasing popularity of your brand name in the internet having a .tel extension. Is it good for SEO or not? As always, we can not find the only answer. This post will try to summerize pluses and minuses of using a domain name of a .tel extension.
Advantages:
1. Many users of .tel service say, that these websites are found by Google after a few weeks of starting using them. Great advantage, but do not we have the same situation with common domains?
2. You have a good source of linking to your main websites.
3. Your .tel is web based already. You just add the information in your own administration section and update as frequently as you need. No knowledge of HTML or scripting languages required.
4. It is by no means flexible: you may add your .tel address to your stationery instead of long list of contact details. Change your contact detail as often as you wish in real time on .tel domain.
5. A .tel domain could be quickly accessed on a computer, phone, blackberry, iPhone etc, because API allows people to view contact information without a browser. It can be viewed with an open-source application on your mobile.
6. Content is a king, domain name is a queen. You may choose (if you are fast enough) a domain name with a word closely related to your business using .tel extension.
Disadvantages:
1. What you do not want is to let a .tel rank higher than your basic website. It’s a quite a hard question, how to make this. To pay for Google for the PPC?
2. There are thousands of John Browns, but only one domain johnbrown.tel. What visite cards to offer for other John Browns?
3. You can not change a template of the page, only the information it presents. It is like a directory type listing without the logo. It is just like replication in worse manner what’s already on your website.
4. It is not a good choice for small business. You have no time buying all domains with your name and spending a bunch of money renewing them. It is more a confusion for the clients having many websites linking to each other.
5. Telnic is just a company. It is not a very good idea to let it control and own private data of all individual and business users.
A few links to get more information about posibilities of .tel:
Another good study for advantages and disadvantages of .tel.
Paulius Sluškonis
Tags: .tel domain, Seo, tel extension, telnic
September 14th, 2009 at 12:58 am
Glad to see you’ve taken an interest in .tel
I just have a few quick points to make in response:
Advantage 1. Currently the major search engines appear to treat .tel domains in the same way they treat other gTLDs. Special purpose .tel search engines also exist, and new ones are being developed.
Advantage 5. Exactly
Mobile networks are inherently latent, which means browsing the web can be frustratingly slow when all you want is a simple piece of contact information, let alone browsing through a directory structure. .tel apps can pull this data straight from your local DNS resolver, which may already have a cached copy, meaning you get what you want in milliseconds rather than seconds.
There are apps available for the iPhone and Blackberry, and more on the way. See http://www.telnic.org/community-applications.html and http://www.hornethub.com/
Disadvantage 1. My honest opinion is that the big search giants will be too slow to react to .tel and special purpose search engines will present the best solution. But I should declare my interest and say that I’m working on one myself
Disadvantage 2. If myname.tel weren’t available then I’d have a couple of other names lined up that I’d be happy to use, and I think other people have similar strategies that they’re comfortable with. Google Mail/Skype/AOL namespaces each include hundreds of millions of names now.
Disadvantage 3. Some people dislike the TelProxy template, but keep an eye out for changes – I’d personally like to see a record type for avatar pointers, and others have their own suggestions. Telnic is very receptive to feedback from the community.
Disadvantage 4. Au contraire, it’s the perfect choice for small businesses
.tel domains are simple to set up, and the cost of ownership is much lower compared to traditional domains since there is no development or hosting required. See what George Moen (President of Blenz Coffee) said about it: http://georgemoen.com/?p=55
Disadvantage 5. You are in complete ownership and control of your data; it’s stored directly in the DNS. You’re free to use any TelHosting provider you like, and you could even run your own TelHosting-accredited nameservers if you wanted to. Everything is open.
I hope I may have assuaged some of your doubts.
- Andy.
September 14th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Thanks a lot, Andy, for the full-scale comment. I hope readers could build a better outlook about .tel, reading your opinion.
To say the truth my idea was to offer pluses and minuses of the .tel services. I can say, that it is the concept of my entire blog. Everything has a bright side and the dark side. And I want to show both. And it is for the reader and for potential costumer to decide to accept or refuse a service.
Well, talking about myself, I’am on the .tel’s side. The thing I like the most is its simplicity and tendence of unifying information. And the fair of sharing your private data is perverted. You may write information, which you want. It’s your choice.
September 14th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Hey Paulius, thanks for your response. I completely understand the desire to cover both the pros and cons – I wasn’t criticising you or your blog, I just wanted to add some counter-arguments
I think there is plenty of room for some refinement to simplify the experience. For example, it’d be nice to see a tighter integration between the TelProxy (web frontend), TelHosting (the place you manage your records) and TelFriends (used for privacy).
Maybe if your opinions develop further you could post a follow-up
- Andy.