The latest gold rush in domain names started in June of this year when ICANN agreed to create new generic top-level domains, or gTLD.

Generic top-level domains would allow corporations and businesses to create a more company-specific URL address.

For example, coming in 2013 a dental practice could reserve .dentist or .dental.

In the past, domain name extensions didn’t play a large role in search engine optimization, but as these new domain-naming conventions are rolled out like .lawyer, .attorney, and .doctor gTLD’s may begin to play a bigger role in search IF the general public begins using them.

A growing search trend is to just type the name you are looking for in the URL address line and see what results the browser returns. If this becomes the norm, then domain extensions might play a bigger factor in SEO.

If you think about targeted search results then domain extensions may help return more accurate results.

But what does Google think about gTLDs?

Google’s Matt Cutts offered his answers to the gTLD question in this video —

But the big question is whether the general public will use them when typing a URL address in search. The .com extension is the most used, even when searchers are looking for a .net address.

It is anticipated that these business-specific URL extension will be expensive.

Stay tuned to The Wealthy Dentist blog and we’ll keep you updated on all the gTLD news updates as they happen and to what effect, if any, they will have on your Internet dental marketing.