.COM is the legacy domain extension with more than 100 million registrations. Stick with .com if you're OK with the status-quo. .CO on the other hand is fresh, shorter, social, and... it's available! With an increasing number of people web browsing on mobile devices, the need for short and memorable domain name has never been so important. In essence, if you want something innovative and cutting edge, go with .CO.

Domain extensions like .info, .mobi, .org and .tv enjoy specific niche markets, which is great if that is what you need for your online branding. .CO is different in that it is more general in meaning and not niche specific.

.CO is registered just like all the other domain extensions. You can get it from domain retailers (a/k/a registrars) for one year or multiple years in advance. As long as you renew your .CO domain, it's yours to keep.

Every website lives within a domain space such as .com, .net, .biz and others. Introduced to satisfy the need for short and memorable web addresses, .CO is a new domain extension that offers you a global option for branding your online presence.

.CO is already meaningful and recognizable in multiple languages and cultures.

It's the acronym for "company". For most people1, the two letters – CO – are recognized as meaning company and/or corporation across the globe. Look around and someone near you is already using the letters CO in that context.

It's used in country-code domain extensions. More than 20 countries use .CO to mean company and/or commercial content in their websites (e.g. .co.uk, .co.in, .co.il, .co.jp, etc.). By adding a .CO domain to their online marketing strategy, country specific websites can now have a version of their site serving their global customers.

In other uses it has geographic meaning. CO means Colombia and it also means the State of Colorado in the USA.

1 According to a research study conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland in 2009, out of 600 past and prospective domain registrants in the USA, more than 75% of respondents associated .CO with company, corporation, or other commercial endeavors.

The short answer is: YES.

If you are a website owner, you know that attracting qualified visitors to your website is incredibly important, and incredibly complex.

There are many methods that webmasters use in order to entice potential customers to their site—one of the most important and effective of those being Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the art and science of driving the most qualified visitors to your website by attaining high search engine results. If you are not already applying the best practices of SEO to your website, you are missing out on qualified visitors ready to convert.

Thinking of switching your old-school web address to a .CO? Tempting, isn't it!?

Lucky for you, it's a piece of cake. The key to the process is ensuring that your site's search engine rankings and incoming links are kept intact. We've seen it done before and it works flawlessly. Angel List and 500 Startups are good examples of recent sites that have upgraded to .CO.

Google has already published documentation about this in their Webmaster Tools area. Start with Moving your site. In there, you'll learn the basics about 301 redirects, a command that tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. Simply put, if someone (including a robot) clicks on one of your old links the computer will know to redirect to your new web address.