Country domain extensions...worthwhile?

[maxpr]

I found a great domain name that I purchased the .com for. It is a simple, unique but perfect name that is only 7 characters long and is available with every extension in the world.

For another domain I have purchased other country extensions, also a good name and only 6 characters long but unfortunately several country extensions were taken and could not be obtained.

My question is, from a marketing standpoint and future expansion is it worthwhile to invest in country extensions that are available and that I am able to get? Or would it be better to have a .com, .eu and then various larger country domains but let some randoms go (like Belgium, Greece, South America etc)? As I am seeing the main markets for one of my service based sites as the US, Germany, Mexico, UK and maybe China, then forget the rest?

Or is it better to just shoot for the .com and have subdomains for different countries? Also which way is more SEO-friendly on the most basic level?

[Sven]

I got quite a few domains for my self steering systems. I do feel that having several extentions of the same name is not relay important. You'd need seperate websites on all of them to have them searched by Google and that would probably water down the quality of search results.

The .com's are the most important. What would be good is to get extra domains for people to remember. I use www.windsteer.com in my physical advertising which leads to www.mistervee.com which is the main domain name. BUT, it may be even better to have a descriptive .com domain as the primary one.

I should actually set www.windvaneselfsteering.com as the primary domain which probably indexes the best in google.

Finally, also try to get the descriptive names that people may try. So I also have windvanesteering.com and other similar ones.

Having more domains than that only costs money that does not do anything. Unless it is something like pizza.com which was sold a short while ago for more than a million after being kept for about a decade for about usd 200...

[maxpr]

I got quite a few domains for my self steering systems. I do feel that having several extentions of the same name is not relay important. You'd need seperate websites on all of them to have them searched by Google and that would probably water down the quality of search results.

The .com's are the most important. What would be good is to get extra domains for people to remember. I use www.windsteer.com in my physical advertising which leads to www.mistervee.com which is the main domain name. BUT, it may be even better to have a descriptive .com domain as the primary one.

I should actually set www.windvaneselfsteering.com as the primary domain which probably indexes the best in google.

Finally, also try to get the descriptive names that people may try. So I also have windvanesteering.com and other similar ones.

Having more domains than that only costs money that does not do anything. Unless it is something like pizza.com which was sold a short while ago for more than a million after being kept for about a decade for about usd 200...

No, no. I have bank.com :) I wish.

See the thing is I like the domain I have currently but as far as indexing goes it would probably index far down because it isn't descriptive of my service, though there are some available that are which I will probably acquire in case I change domain names. Reason is most of the domains for my idea/site design are taken (but are being squated on by domain sellers or larger companies) so I had to get creative. On the plus side I don't have thisismyideaanditisreallygreat.com as I think simple short domain names are better for service based sites, fickle people would more likely remember ideagreat.com or something simpler. If I sold laptops I would probably murder someone for laptops.com but if I serviced them I could have maxslaptopservice.com or something else.

Well, cool. I guess I will let my country extensions die. My main site I am working on now is a .de and I actually wanted the .de extension but I also have it in .cz, .pl, .be, .se, .es, .ch, .at and .nl however the .com was taken by a bigger company with a similar name, though they are not using it. Though since the site will eventually have a German-language version perhaps I should hang on to the .at and .ch. I thought if push came to shove over the similar name, if I maintained a list of important other extensions then I would be given leniency (it is the equivalent of me having goog.com instead of google.com basically).

Thanks Sven. Never been sailing myself though my girlfriend went in your home country and said it was a lot of fun. I'd like to go some day. Unique idea/muse.