A lot of consideration goes into what to call your business — or at least it should, because having a business name that closely aligns with what people are looking for online goes a long way toward ranking highly in Internet searches. You hopefully also know that choosing a domain name that closely aligns with your business (and what it offers) is important for SEO reasons.

With that said, it’s just as critical to pick the perfect website domain name and extension (.com, .biz, .net, .org, etc.) for your business.

Let’s start with the .com extension. Is that the best choice for you, or is it better to go with something such as .biz if the domain name you wanted is already taken with a .com extension?

The answer is pretty simple: If at all possible, always get a .com extension.

More than half of all websites are .com sites, and it’s the expected option for a commercial site (unlike something like a government [.gov] or educational [.edu] site). You want your domain name to be easy to remember and easy to find, and most people will immediately assume it’s a .com site.

If you’ve decided on a domain name you think is perfect but its .com version is already taken, the next-best option actually is .net. It’s the second-most popular choice.

You might think .biz is a good option, but that extension actually has a bit of a bad reputation, frequently being associated with sites that are low quality and/or spammy.

There are a lot of other specialty extensions that can be considered for your business, but it’s a much better idea to stick with the most popular options.