Facts about Canadian Domain Names – .CA
.ca is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada. Registrants of .ca domains must meet Canadian Presence Requirements as defined by the registry. Examples of valid entities include:
- a Canadian citizen of the age of majority,
- a permanent resident of Canada,
- a legally recognized Canadian organization,
- an Inuit, First Nation, Métis or other people indigenous to Canada,
- an Indian Band as defined in the Indian Act of Canada,
- a foreign resident of Canada that holds a registered Canadian trademark,
- An executor, administrator or other legal representative of a person or organization that meets the requirements,
- a division of the government,
- Queen Elizabeth II in her capacity as head of state of Canada
Registrants can either register domains at the second level (e.g. example.ca) or at the third level in one of the geographic second-level domains defined by the registry (e.g. example.ab.ca).
There are three kinds of domain names:
1. Type-in names
About 15% of surfers actually type in the name followed by a .com into the address bar. These domains are often parked with registrars who delivers PPC ads and share the revenue with domain owners. These names are valued by the amount of daily type-in traffic. These names are also often brands onto themselves.
2. Brandable domain names.
These names can be very valuable to the right company. The name must be extremely easy to remember. The name becomes the brand. Companies will market the domain name itself. Like Yahoo and Amazon. These names very often bear no reflection on the services or products – but are catchy.
3. Keyword filled domain names.
These domain names describe the services of the company and contain the website’s main keywords. This is very powerful since search engines like to see the keywords in the domain names.
For websites that rely on search engine traffic – it is almost necessary to have a domain name with the keywords. These names don’t fit into the other categories but can be as valuable as good type-in or brandable names.
Example: gettingcarinsurance.com contains two very valuable keywords – car and insurance. A website selling car insurance will use names like that unless they have a brand. Many companies have several domains – their brand name + many keyword-driven web sites. Value of keyword is often calculated by using Google’s AdWord cost to buy top positioning for a keyword.
NOTE: Some domain names can be any or all of the above. The top domain names say it all. Like mortgage.com. They are also worth millions of dollars.
The New York Times described the word “I-Reporter” as one of 2007’s buzzwords: a word which endured long enough to find a place in the national conversation. The success of iReport has led to, for instance, the 2007 New Year’s Eve coverage featuring iParty in which viewers’ photos of their celebrations were shown on television.