Every country in the world has been assigned some sort of extension that starts with a dot followed by two letters, such as .pk is for Pakistan and are called country code level top-level domains. They’re also divided between first and second-level domains. .com.pk is a second-level domain name, but .pk is the first-level.
Now, why not .com, .net, or .org that we’re most familiar with around the world. Well, when engineers in the USA decided to start a domain name for the users to identify complex number schemes into some easy-to-remember name, they decided to identify the type of entities with nature of their core business, such as dot COM for commercial business, dot ORG for mostly non-profit organizations, dot NET, related to something that represents computer networking, dot EDU for educational sites, and dot GOV and dot MIL only belongs to the USA. Government and Military related sites.
But once its potential was realized other domain extensions based on countries’ abbreviations were created. Mostly all 2 letters. Eventually, when countries were ready to handle them as they’re managed by each of the countries’ own infrastructure and then they were called ccTLD, meaning country code top-level domains as earlier domains were called GTLD, the exception to .gov/.mil, meaning globally top-level domain.
So why .pk for Pakistan. Technically, you can purchase any domain and try to be whatever you want when you are in Pakistan. But .pk will require less marketing effort as the search engines will know where that user is coming from and what to show them based on the country code.
Not everyone is going to be buying stuff online from another country or shipping it to. As all that requires extra shipping time plus the added cost for international shipping is always going to be high. And obviously, we can’t forget about our custom handling that we will need to fill out for any shipment with declaring forms, etc. Then, it has a huge chance of getting stuck with custom officers for perhaps extra duties or VAT, etc.
So to cut all the confusion and getting a good name, perhaps at no extra cost directly from PKNIC or by acquiring it from someone if someone is willing to sell it, might be a good option for a business owner who wants to expand his business from anywhere to everywhere within Pakistan. But that doesn’t mean only Pakistan, you can attract all sorts of users from around the world as well. If your business is within Pakistan, it will be a more obvious choice to acquire a .pk domain extension. Not only that it will be harder to find any of the .com domains, which is more attractive and easy to remember for a user, such as any of the 4 letters and in any combination will cost you at least 1000 US dollars to start with and if that is a word noun it could be anywhere between thousand of dollars to somewhere upwards in million of dollars.
Plus the advantage of having a .pk is higher for a user in Pakistan versus .com as the search engines will rank the site with .pk on the top of the .com domain extension. Businesses over the internet love SEO, which is to optimize the site the way so when a user types a particular term or a query, it will bring their site to the top of the list of all the searches that a search engine will pull and display them for a user to go to by clicking on the link of there choice. Well, that is the internet traffic, or in other words, internet customers who can be translated into something you want to offer. Like I’m offering my Pakistani domain market services.
At this point, I guess I have tried to explain in a bit way of my, why .pk is important for Pakistan and why they’re called ccTLDs at a high level, and hopefully, you got the gist of the idea that why you should be interested in it.
I will have a blog sometime soon where I will try to elaborate why they are more of virtual properties or, in other words, lands as we see in our physical world.
