I’m not sure which hat you want to call this — honestly, I wouldn’t consider it blackhat seeing as you mass following people really does nothing negative to those people and they are under no obligation to follow you back. Many Twitter experiments have found that you can get around 10% of people you mass follow to follow you back — even if they don’t know you and have never heard of you.

Twitter Spamming

The main reason I don’t consider this blackhat is because pretty much everyone on Twitter does it. I have approx 1000 followers on 2 Twitter accounts and I can’t imagine how anyone could find time to follow more people… People following 10,000+ people? Give me a break. It’s not humanly possible to actually listen to what these followers are all saying. Sure, most won’t go out and use a program like FlashTweet or find a Twitter power user in their niche and follow all his followers, however I really don’t see any difference between using automated mass following software and following everyone who follows you when you don’t give a damn about them, what they say, or what they do.

In all honesty, I think a lot of Twitter users know many of the people following them likely don’t have pure intentions. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I know many people on Twitter and other social networks seem to be in some sort of pissing contest about who can get the most friends/followers. To them, having 10,000 untargeted followers is better than having a few hundred people who genuinely care about what they say. Think of it like having a website — Who doesn’t look at their traffic and/or Alexa stats on a daily basis, neither of which say anything about whether visitors are interested or not in your content? Who submits their posts to Digg, StumbleUpon, Reditt, etc, hoping to land some of that extremely untargeted traffic just to pump up your traffic and Alexa rank stats? Who engages in questionable SEO practices or targets keywords unrelated to their website just because they think they can get more traffic to their site that way?

Utterly Clueless Advertisers

I always find it somewhat funny when people try to justify why it costs $X to advertise on their site and use something like “I get 10,000 uniques per month, I have 100,000 page views per month”, etc. Honestly, what does it mean at all? If I wanted to, I could pump this blog’s unique visitor account up to 100,000 visitors and then I could employ a few strategies to intentionally inflate my Alexa rank. If you’re selling advertising on your site, that really is a genius idea and most advertisers are so utterly clueless, they’re likely to not even notice — and even if they do, you never made them any promises about the quality of unique visitors, merely the amount of unique visitors. If you actually care about growing your site into a community of like-minded individuals however, these tactics are of no benefit.

We All Manipulate

Can you or anyone you know honestly say they’ve never tried to manipulate search engine rankings? Hell, SEO itself is all about manipulating search engine rankings. Linkbait is often about tricking clueless bloggers into linking to your controversial material that you intentionally wrote to be controversial and get links you quite honestly don’t deserve. Badges/Widgets — that has to be the pinnacle of gaming the system. I had someone email me yesterday saying I had won a “Domainer of the Month” award. Now as this post has probably shown you, I’m often suspicious of the intentions of others. Lo and behold, his site has an Alexa rank of 13 million. Clever strategy ain’t that — try and stroke the ego of a guy getting 100 times as much traffic as you are and then ask him to write a blog post on his blog about their site and the award that I supposedly won. I’d name and shame, however that’d be giving him the traffic he wants. Badges really are great — tell people they’re #1 or #2 in their industry and get them to proudly show of their #1 or #2 rank on their website — of course 99% of the time there’s a link going back to the creator of these badges, so you really have to wonder if they created the badgets to award the best or to award their website with a bit of extra link juice. Seeing as nofollow is no more, you’re killing your pagerank no matter what by linking to these trivial ego boosters. My site really is that great? How about you send me some money instead of some lame badge

Widgets — hmm, I wonder why someone spent hours of their time making something only to give it a way for free… To be fair, there are some great, honest developers who want to help grow the blogging community, however there’s equally as many that have hidden links in there to boost their pagerank at the expense of yours. How many times does someone email you asking to swap links? Notice a pattern? How often do they have a lower pagerank than you do? They’re often not swapping links out of the goodness of their heart — they’re knowingly swapping links at your expense. Article writers.. How many people will volunteer to write an article on a PR0? How many would do it on a PR5? It’s not about helping you, it’s about helping them.

Reality

Black hat, grey hat, white hat… There really is only one kind of SEO hat and that my friends is a black hat.

Jason Lavigne from Rebel.com let me know about a special their sister company Domainsatcost.ca is offering: $8.75 per .ca domain in celebration of Canada Day.

use the promo code : HAPPYBIRTHDAY

It’s a 48 hour special, so don’t wait around too long if you’ve been wanting to reg a few .ca domains

Website: http://www.domainsatcost.ca/

I thought long and hard about making this into a post, however I thought it’d be even more useful to just give you links to some of the best link building resources on the Internet. The good news is that it’s a whole lot better than I could possibly make a blog post. The bad news is that it’s a whole lot longer as well.. The simple truth is that there is no quick and easy 100% guaranteed way to acquire a ton of links — at least no legal ways. Well, there is one legal way but it won’t be cheap — buy an authority site like DMOZ and put links to your site in there 1800 times like AOL did.

1. SEO Book >> Link Building

2. Sugarrae >> 11 Experts on Link Development Speak

3. SEOmoz >> Link Building

4. Search Engine Land >> Eric Ward

5. Link Building Wiki

Don’t let these 5 links deceive you — there’s easily several months worth of reading here :)

Namepros is having an auction exclusively for short domains on Thursday, July 2nd at 6PM EST.
I’ll be there — I hope you will as well

If you’ve been running your blog or website for some time now, you probably have a lot of posts that are irrelevant, redundant, or possibly even downright wrong. As an example, I don’t think anyone today will gain any value from a post I wrote about domains being auctioned on GreatDomains in April! Looking through the 180 posts I had, it wasn’t very hard to find posts which explained the same thing. In some cases, having 2 posts on the matter was redundant, in other cases my server side stats suggested one of the pages was getting little search engine traffic and few page views.

I went through all my posts and looked at both their page view and entry statistics. If a post hasn’t been on the first page of my blog during the month of June, entry numbers represent search engine traffic and traffic from inbound links. With 2200+ search engine referrals so far this month and 102,000+ page views on 180 posts, the average post should be getting around 12 search engine referrals per month and 567 page views — page views should be lower on this which weren’t created in June due to the fact a substantial amount of clicks comes from bot being on the homepage and being seen on Domaining.com.

I had 70 posts which had received 0-3 search engine referrals and under 100 page views — when this site averages 3500+ page views per day, a post which didn’t manage to even get viewed 100 times over the course of a month clearly isn’t a very popular post. One of the things I recently did was get my posts categorized — it’s a nice way to help visitors find what they’re looking for, however it does have the unfortunate side effect of indiscriminately awarding link juice. Now why would I want as much link juice flowing to a post which receives 3 search engine referrals monthly as one that receives 30?

Pagerank sculpting hasn’t died with the introduction of nofollow — it just requires thinking about things differently. If you look at my category section on the homepage, you’ll notice there’s no uncategorized category. That’s because my category section isn’t actually a category section — it’s a text widget that I happened to name “Categories” and place hyperlinks to where I wanted link juice flowing. So if I don’t want unpopular posts stealing link juice from the popular ones, I simply categorize them as “Uncategorized” and they never get seen again. Some unpopular posts still have a purpose — an LLLL.com price guide from 2007 for example is highly inaccurate today and hence is of little use to most visitors, however someone curious about how the LLLL.com market has performed since the LLLL.com buyout might find such a post extremely useful. Rather than link to such posts normally, I created an “Old LLLL.com price guides” post and placed links in it to all of the older LLLL.com price guides in.

My blog now has 110 posts instead of 180 and many of these 110 aren’t featured in the main category listings, meaning more juice flowing to the pages I want it to flow to. The posts I deleted were all 301 redirected, so I haven’t lost any link juice by doing this and can now spend that link juice where I want to — that’s even better than nofollow because now I can spend the link juice even the page that otherwise would have been nofollowed has accumulated. As for search engine referrals, they’re actually up about 5% so far since I made the change — it almost seems counterintuitive that you’d get more traffic by deleting posts which were getting traffic, however that’s what I’ve done and that’s what my result has been.

Because I haven’t monetized this blog, this is really just experimentation to see what the outcome would be. I remember reading about the V7N forum owner moving unpopular posts out of the part of his forum search engines indexed and had quite successful results doing this — 7000 more daily search engine referrals. If I were selling something on this blog, it would only make sense to get rid of pages not converting or converting poorly, so that more traffic flows to pages which are resulting in sales.

I’m going to write a long post about link building tomorrow but thought I’d share one method today. Take a look at:

• AddThis.com

• OpenCube.com

These websites both have PR9 homepages. Take a look at the Alexa rank on OpenCube.com — it doesn’t even get twice as much traffic as my blog, so how the heck did they get a PR9? As for AddThis.com, their whole website is centered around providing visitors with a free button which allows their visitors to share and bookmark content. I forgot one detail: OpenCube.com has over 1 million links pointing to it and ClearSpring, the parent company of AddThis.com, receives millions of uniques each month. Clearly in this Web 2.0 age, good content, traditional SEO, and traditional link building can only take you so far. It’s easier said then done to tell people to build something people will want to put on their site — for one thing, you have to know how to build it. For most of us who don’t have the tech saavy to build something like this, hiring someone to do it is our only option. That won’t be cheap, nor will spending enough money to get our creation popular enough that people would want to put it on their site. When you look at the tens of thousands some people spend monthly between buying paid links, advertising on Adwords, and advertising on other websites, the cost might pay for itself relatively quickly if it catches on. If it doesn’t, it’s a whole lot of money down the drain.

So that there is the best way to acquire links — it’s certainly not the cheapest way and I’ll post a long list tomorrow of some of the ways free and cheaper ways to acquire links.

Every time a well-known person dies, a school shooting happens, an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, plane crash, etc occurs, idiot wannabe domainers are first on the scene to register names like MJIsDead.com (no, I’m not going to  give you a link). Private registration — I wonder why. Doesn’t really matter what you or I think of MJ — he’s still a person and he still has family, friends, and fans who miss him dearly. It’s NEVER crossed my mind to ever register a domain like this about anyone. Some “domainers” are going so far as to justify this, saying the media makes money off the stories so why can’t they. You learn that 2 wrongs don’t make a right in what, kindergarten? Everyone knows many reporters are right up there with lawyers and payday loan vendors as the lowliest scum on the planet — is that where we’ve now set the ethics bar?

A lot of domainers are starting to sound a whole lot like black hat SEOs. These guys are another class of idiots who think they can hijack urls and subdomains, inject links into other people’s websites, put up multiple 10,000 page splogs, spam the shit out of everyone’s blog comments (mine included) with pharmaceutical, gambling, and adult content links, put spyware on people’s computer which tells them they have a virus when they don’t and threatens them what will happen if they don’t buy their product, etc and think it’s unfair when someone like Google decides they don’t need scum like that in their index…

The more and more I see stuff like this, the more and more I see the merits of increased regulation.

Small post today but it gets across a big message… You have to know when to sell and sometimes waiting isn’t the right thing to do. Take a look at this article on BBC News right back at the peak of the Dotcom Boom.

This article really is perfect as it was literally written exactly at the peak of the dotcom boom. From mid-2000 through early 2003, the NASDAQ continued to fall. Some of the domains sold in 2001-2003 (eg. Inbox.com for $2000) would very likely have sold for 100 times what they did had they sold in 1999-2000. I wasn’t around in 1997, however you can read up on it and see how tier 1 generics go from being under 10k to being million+ domains by 1999. And then 2001 happens, the bubble burst and people think the whole internet was just one big fad. The only thing that really proved to be a fad was VCs shelling out big bucks on companies which had a good domain name (eg. Pets.com) and not much else going for them.

I have 700 four letter .coms to sell over the next 4 days (which is when they expire), so I might not be able to find time to write any other posts until I get that done. What I’d like to ask is whether there are any topics you’d like to see covered — maybe some questions you have that you’d like answered or even a more in depth article on something already covered.

Ray asked me a few days ago if I could write an in depth post on link building — that’ll be the next post.

I’m open to suggestions on what you’d like to see written about next week or what you’d like to see written about more often. I’m perfectly happy to continue covering domain development and SEO and those 2 topics have proven to be quite popular so far, however I’m willing to cover just about anything Internet-related if you’d like to see something different. If I’m not familiar with what you’re interested in reading more about, I’ll find someone who is and can write about it.

Have you given serious thought to developing your domains? Domain development is what I’ve been doing lately – developing this domain blog into a website and learning as much as I can about domain development. Developing your domains doesn’t have to be hard. There are many different ways to develop domains – I’ll cover a few ways to develop domains in this post and will provide additional domain development tips in a future post.

I don’t see many people buying domains the way they used to. If you’re not buying domains and you’re not selling domains, what are you doing with your time? I’m doing some domain brokering, helping one domain investor sell some of his ccTLD domains, and spending time improving my domain development skills. How much money could I save by developing my own domains instead of paying hundreds/thousands (depending on the domain development requirements) per domain getting someone to develop my domain for me?

The great thing about domain development today is that plenty of domain development software is available to assist web developers of all skill levels. It’s hard to get through to many domain name investors about why development really is the way to go — many will say they’re domainers, not webmasters. How many people can afford to be pure domainers nowadays? Domain parking had many people in the past saying their domains would make more parked than developed – few domains would make more parked than developed today. Think about whether you could make more by having your domains developed.

Pure domaining is a pipe dream for most new domainers today. Today, it takes money to make money in the domain business. Sure, you can make a little money domaining, however I don’t see many new domainers making a living off new domain registrations or by flipping domains unless they came in with a large bankroll.  A quick look over at the domain appraisal section of any domain forum will give you a pretty good idea of the abilities of a new domain investor to find and register good domains.

Domain Development: Free or Paid?

Domain development for many focuses on trying to optimize their domains for the keywords getting the most searches, not realizing the competition they face in ranking well for these top keywords. Rethink domain development if your domain development strategy revolves ranking well for highly competitive keywords.Domain development isn’t about getting the most traffic — if that’s all domain development were, we’d just just buy one of those cheap website traffic packages. What we’re looking for when developing domains is quality traffic — domain traffic which will convert into sales. I’ve often talked about niche domains on this blog — what we’re talking about here essentially amounts to niche keywords. By targeting something more specific (or niche), we’re reducing the amount of keyword competition and hence, the difficulty in ranking well for the keyword. The only way to go about developing your domains is by targeting long tail keywords. Many domain investors have the desire to develop their domains, however just because domain development no longer requires being a webmaster does not mean domain development will be right for you. Before you decide to dedicate any part of your domain monetization strategy to domain development, do yourself a favor and develop a few domains. Developing domains takes a lot of time and there’s usually a lot of upkeep involved. If you plan on hiring article writers or making use of advertising and marketing services, be aware of the costs. Make sure domain development is still a better option than the alternatives after all costs have been accounted for. You’ll also need to carefully consider what platform to use for developing your domains — Whypark, Noomle, Wordpress, another CMS, or perhaps a premium domain development solution, such as the domain development services provided by AEIOU.com, DomainMassDevelopment.com, MiniSites.com, and SiteGraduate.com. If you do choose to use one of these premium domain development services, it’s all the more important that you sit down and figure out how you’re going to make that money back. Domain development can be done in Wordpress or in something custom designed. You might very well use a combination of free and paid domain development, saving your best domains or the domains you think have the best domain monetization potential for paid domain development.

Good Domain Development

Plenty of domainers, webmasters, and SEO consultants will tell you that the search engine traffic you receive could be one Google algorithm change away from disappearing, so don’t just write for SEO. Outsourcing is cheap enough nowadays that even if I wanted something more than a cheap website, it really wouldn’t break the bank to have someone else take care of any domain development I’m unable to do myself. Looking at the price of a premium web design suite compared to what you’re going to pay per minisite if someone else is going to be developing your domains for you, the choice was pretty simple for me on which way to go.  When developing domains, think about how to maximize the value of your time. Time spent developing domains might break down as follows: 50% of time spent developing good content, 25% spent developing excellent content, and 25% spent on link building and SEO.

Domain Development Strategies

You really have 3 ways to to start developing your domains: Develop your domains into hundreds of small minisites, develop your domains into websites, and/or develop some some domains into minisites and other domains into websites. Without getting into how many websites you’ll be competing against, my personal thoughts on the matter are to ask yourself what you’d like to do. Personally, I like short domains — I enjoy talking about short domains both on Namepros and on this site, so it was only natural for me to want to develop LLLL.com into something more than a minisite. If you have domains in your portfolio which cater to what you’re interested in, it’ll be a whole lot easier to spend the necessary time properly developing them compared to domains you have no interest in and hence, likely no interest in developing. Minisites are quick, easy, and don’t need anywhere near the amount of maintenance a website or high traffic blog is going to need to succeed. What turns out to be the best option for you might not just depend on your like or dislike for the subject your domain name caters to, but also to the size of your niche. There’s no way I could consistently write about only short domains on a daily basis. Looking at blogs which are updated daily, most of them have something in common – they have many or very broad topics.

Domain Development: Reality

If you’re still not sold on domain development, I really don’t know what else to say..  Even if you’re not a short domain name investor and even if your keyword domains are making a satisfactory amount of money, why not try for more? What do you have to lose by giving domain development a try on a couple sites and see if it produces better results than parking or otherwise making use of your domains? It was just announced a couple days ago that Parked.com bought Whypark and with earnings from developed minisites reported to be up to 10 times higher, that might be something worth looking into.

My favorite domaining quote is something said by the Domain King: “You don’t make a million dollars. You make a dollar, 1 million times.”  That’s probably more true than intended if you’ve developed hundreds of minisites, however no matter how you go about your domain development, it’s pretty clear that you need to make $1 before you can make $2. Finds something that works for you and repeat it — over and over again.

For all the risks domainers have taken in years past investing in domains and domain name segments whose futures were uncertain, it’s somewhat surprising how safe most like to play it when it comes to domain name development. Live a little, take a risk.

Why not have the best of both worlds – great domains developed to capitalize as much as possible on the direct navigation traffic your domains already receive? Not happy with the amount of traffic/revenue your domains are receiving — are prepared to put in a little work to reach your goals? We can talk all we want about successful domainers, but the bottom line is that no pure domainer ever has or ever will make remotely close to what the best web developers are making.

Like anything else on the Internet, do your research before choosing a domain development service provider.

February 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide

December 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

July 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

May 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

April 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

Mid-February 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

February 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

January 2008 LLLL.com Price Guide

December 2007 LLLL.com Price Guide

LLLL.com Domain Buyout: One Year Later (November 2008)

Your website’s bounce rate represents the number of visitors (in percent) to your website who leave your website prior to visiting a second page. Some web analytics software will also log visits under a certain length of time as a bounce. If you land on this blog’s homepage for example and the post titles don’t sound like something you’d like to read, you might leave without reading any of the posts — you would be registered as a “bounce” on web analytics software. Why web developers should care about their bounce rate suddenly becomes obvious — if visitors are leaving your site without clicking on any other pages, that means you’re likely not providing them with what they were looking for when they initially found (or returned to) your website. Improving your website’s bounce rate isn’t as easy as most other metrics — by the very definition of bounce rate, bounced visitors aren’t going to visit your contact information page and send you an email about what they would have liked to have seen on your website. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to convert visitors into sales or not — any web developer’s goal should be to keep visitors on his site as long as possible or necessary for conversion. Every additional page visited is one more chance to convert that visitor into a sale, one more chance that the visitor might click that Adsense ad, one more chance to have your message be heard.

Bounce Rate SEO

Google is ever so secretive about their ranking factors, however many SEOs believe the bounce rate, or more specifically, your bounce rate relative to that of other sites in your niche, may be a ranking factor — possibly even a significant ranking factor. Does it not make sense? If your website is providing content that visitors are looking for, you shouldn’t have a 100% bounce rate.  One unfortunate limitation of bounce rates is that they’re not necessarily a good measure of how interested visitors are in your content. As said previously, it’s a fairly safe to assume a 100% bounce rate on search engine traffic for a particular keyphrase implies that the website didn’t have the keyword connotation visitors were looking for, but what it’s not always that simple. We don’t know how search engines may be logging bounces, however many web analytics programs use a session timeout of 30 minutes — a visitor who doesn’t visit a second page on your website within 30 minutes will register as a bounce just as they would had they left your website by clicking a link to a different website, entered a different website into the address bar, closed their web browser window/tab, etc. One problem with measuring a bounce rate using such a low session timeout is that if someone writes a very long post, it’s quite possible you wouldn’t have had a chance to finish reading it within 30 minutes — you might have been jotting down notes as you read it or read it a second time with the end result that you were on the page for longer than 30 minutes. One obvious solution to this that I’ve implement on this blog is to have post summaries on the homepage instead of full posts — the bounce rate was almost 100% when I was displaying five 2000+ word posts on the homepage. For most websites, the homepage receives the most page views and hence, is an important place to begin optimizing your site to reduce the bounce rate. Be careful not to optimize your site for search engines so much that it detracts from user experience.

Monitoring Bounce Rates

There are various programs out there to monitor bounce rate,  such as Google Analytics.  Don’t just focus on bounce rates however — focus on getting visitors on your website to view more pages. My average visitor so far this month has viewed 5.07 pages per visit to the site, compared with 4.27 pages per visit in May — they’re viewing almost 1 page more on average and I would like to think some of the changes I’ve made above are part of the reason for it.  Found below are a few suggestions on making your website more user friendly and encouraging more page views.

Reducing the Bounce Rate

1. Site Navigation — If visitors aren’t able to find pages that interest them, they’re not going to visit other pages — take broken links as an extreme example of eliminating the possibility of viewing a page.  I added a popular posts section and added the posts which my web analytics software has told me have gotten the most page views (presumably the pages visitors have found most useful). In my case, the posts listed in my popular post section are also responsible for the overwhelming majority of my search engine traffic, so naturally I would want to link them to my homepage and give them a bit more link juice than other pages. Recently, I added the Yet Another Related Post Plugin — a Wordpress plugin that displays posts which a mathematical algorithm has determined are most related to other posts, giving visitors some likely good posts to read next. I also have the SEO Smart Links plugin which creates links out of certain words I’ve indicated I would like to be linked to certain threads. You do have to watch this one a bit and it has gone a little crazy creating 3 links in one post for “domain development”, despite having checked off an option on the plugin that it display links for a keyword/keyphrase at most once.

2. Site Aesthetics –  As mentioned in my recent article on first impressions, people do judge websites by how they look. I designed a new header for this site to make the free Wordpress theme it’s using not look like a free Wordpress theme. I got rid of the navigation bar, the second sidebar, and changed the background from being completely white to being grey outside the 960px wide theme (only visible if using a browser window wider than 960 pixels). I changed the default h1 tag color from blue to green and changed the size of h2 tag content. Using the space saved by getting rid of the second sidebar, I made the post area wider — originally 500px, the post area is now 720px, meaning 44% more content is written on each line and hence, less scrolling is needed to view content. I got rid of unnecessary links, such as the author link previously present in each post, I changed comments from being no-follow links to non-link text to encourage spammers to find another website to spam and to encourage genuine discussion rather than 1 sentence comments hoping to get some free traffic. I got rid of the footer — will probably bring it back, however I won’t be bringing back the footer links to Wordpress and the theme author’s website (I paid for the right to remove the footer links). I also plan on adding more images to posts in the future so there’s not so much white space. and to change the design of sidebar elements, removing the last visible indicator that this site uses a free Wordpress theme. When visually improving your website, be mindful of those with slower Internet connections and how long it may take them to download a multi-megabyte homepage. If a website doesn’t load within 10 seconds, I’ll usually go back to Google and search for another similar website, unless I’ve been to this website before and know it has content I’m interested in. Despite you having a 30″ widescreen monitor, remember that some of your visitors don’t, so try and make content suitable for those with smaller, lower resolution monitors. Nobody likes having to do a lot of scrolling, especially horizontally.

3. Post titles and post excerpts that make visitors want to read more — Contrary to what some people would tell you, a post title really doesn’t need to be anything witty/controversial. Yes, a title like I had awhile back of “Are you that ####ing stupid?” is sure to be clicked, however that’s not exactly something you can do everyday, plus, it really isn’t necessary. If you know what kind of things your readers will be interested in, then you should know how to write titles that will interest them. A simple post title such as “Using Escrow.com” is a perfect title to describe what visitors will find in a post about Escrow.com — visitors to my site have at the very least heard of Escrow.com and know it’s an online escrow service which can be used to safely buy and sell both tangible and intangible goods, such as domain names. There’s no need to further explain what the post contains because my site audience knows beforehand what the post will be about. If this weren’t a blog about domain names and domain development and were instead, say, a blog about safely using the Internet, a better post title might be “How To Safely Make Online Purchases”.

4. Increase Visitor Interaction — Writing controversial posts isn’t the only way to get visitors to stick around and possibly leave a comment. Ask visitors a question at the end of a post such as “What do you guys think?” Domainers have been talking a lot recently about call to action domains; are your posts calling you visitors to take action? What action do you want your visitors to take? What can you do to make more of your visitors take this action? Domain development is a quite popular topic in the domain name world at the moment — it only makes sense to throw in a few domain development posts on a domain name blog or do like me and completely shift your blog over into that direction.

Bounce Rates and Conversions

The biggest flaw with web analytics traffic metrics is what I’ve criticized social network reported traffic statistics about in the past — they list numbers such as page views, unique visitors, registered members. Let’s think about this for 1 second. If I have a forum with 10,000 members but only 500 have visited the site within the past 90 days, do I have 10,000 or 500 members? Clearly, I only have 500 active members — the only statistic that actually matters. Page Views — Without further information, I have no way to know the distribution of page views — were 1000 visitors responsible for 100 page views each or were 20,000 visitors responsible for 5 page views each? Which would be more preferable? Unique visitors — of what use are they if they bounce immediately upon visiting? Saying a site has 10,000 unique visitors is like saying 10,000 people entered a particular shopping mall today. As a retail store, would you want more visitors or more sales? The goal is obviously to convert more visitors into sales and hence one would want more visitors because they represent more potential sales, however if given the option to solely choose between having more visitors who will not buy your products and less visitors who will… Most advertisers are utterly clueless about this, so if you want to make money off your blog from advertisers, by all means submit your article to Digg and hopefully you’ll get several thousand 100% untargeted uniques. You’ll have a great Alexa rank but you won’t have any more sales. The users who are most likely to be valuable to you and/or advertisers are first of all repeat visitors and secondly, search engine referred visitors for keywords and keyphrases which match the content of your site. If someone visits your site every day and only visits 1 or 2 pages because they’ve already read all your other content, that’s not a bad thing and should be distinguished from first time website visitors quickly leaving your website upon their first arrival. As great as a low bounce rate is, the ultimate goal is a low bounce rate from visitors who might convert into sales — putting a scantily clad woman as an image on this site so people click on it to enlarge the image will surely result in a lower bounce rate with the Digg crowd, however it’s still useless traffic — useless traffic that is now wasting a whole lot more of my bandwidth. Conversely, a high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing if your content matches up so well with the products your advertisers/Adsense are offering that they immediately head over to consider buying them. When analyzing your website’s bounce rate, it’s important that you look at the bounce rate on individual pages and not only the overall bounce rate of your website.

Going back to the Digg example, it’s very likely that the bounce rate on Digg traffic will be much higher than your site’s average, so if you get a lot of traffic from Digg because an article on your website made the Digg front page, then it’ll pull up your entire site’s bounce rate — obviously the problem here (if we want to call it a problem) would be the bounce rate on this one individual page, not that of the rest of the site. Furthermore, because we know Digg traffic is of much lower quality than the traffic normally coming to our website, we know there’s not really a problem at all and the end result was to be expected. Once you’ve discounted any obvious reasons for a high bounce rate, is there any other reason why a particular page has a higher bounce rate than others? Taking the Digg example one step further — you could analyze bounce rates from traffic originating from different sources on different pages. If search engine traffic is bouncing, it’s probably because they’re not finding on your website what they were looking for. With other websites linking to your content, you’ll get a lot of curiosity clicks, especially if the website linking to you isn’t in the same niche as your website. Even if the website linking to you is in your niche, unless other content on your site is similar to what’s being linked to, chances are these visitors will bounce. If the traffic this page receives is a reasonably large amount, you’ll want to do something about it — it might be worth looking into further improving site navigation, linking to more articles, or creating and linking to additional articles similar to the popular article with a high bounce rate.

Exit Rates

Unlike bounces, we can’t prevent exits — everyone will eventually leave a website, whether it’s to view a different website, because they turned their computer off, their Internet disconnected, etc. While we can’t prevent exits, we can however carefully monitor the exit rate of particular pages to see which pages aren’t performing as well as they should be. Think of the exit rate as the bounce rate on any particular page, treating each page as if it were the first page visited. Depending on where you receive the majority of your traffic from, exit rates may possibly be more important than bounce rates. Exit rates after the first page viewed may be an even better indicator of whether visitors are finding what they’re looking for than bounce rates. If a visitor was interested enough in learning more about bounce rates to click on this post’s title and view the article, they were clearly interested in reading about bounce rates. Suppose I were to split this article into 2 parts on bounce rates  — if most visitors exit after reading the first part, I know that visitors probably didn’t find the information they were hoping to find or didn’t find enough valuable information to justify spending any more time reading about bounce rates on my site.

Suppose I made a sitemap which linked to all the categories of my website and then each of these categories linked to the posts in their respective categories. If someone were to exit after clicking one of the category links, it would mean they were clearly interested in one of the topics they thought I had on my site but when they saw the content, nothing interested them. Are your titles descriptive enough of the content to be found? Are there any important topics in that category which you haven’t yet covered (hint: look at the keywords and keyphrases bringing you search engine traffic)? If you have a product page with an extremely high bounce rate, chances are visitors aren’t interested in your products or you’re not doing a good enough job selling visitors on why they should buy your product and how it will be of use to them.

One more thing to think about is whether you actually want to provide your visitors with as much value as possible. If these bounces or exits are converting into clicks or sales, you might want to see what you can do to increase the bounce rate and exit rate. Suppose I had a domain name ebook for sale on this site and every couple days you see me give away a few pages of content for free. Would this make you more or less inclined to buy the ebook? If you like the content being provided on the site, it might reassure you that the content in the ebook is worth paying for, however if I give out too much content for free, you might wonder why you’d bother paying and might as well just wait until I give out all the content in the ebook for free. A second example.. Suppose you run a web hosting review website — chances are your goal is to convert visitors into customers of the web hosts you review so that you can earn an affiliate commission. If your reviews aren’t detailed enough and you don’t cover enough web hosts, visitors might choose to visit a second or third website before deciding which web host to go with and you’ve lost your opportunity to convert them into a sale. On the other hand, if your reviews are extremely detailed and you’ve done so for 1000 other web hosting companies, customers are going to spend all day going through your pages looking at all the other web hosting companies and most likely taking a whole lot longer before deciding on a web hosting company to go with than they would have had less information and choices been presented. There’s a fine line between encouraging visitors to return so you can have new opportunities to convert them to sales and providing so much value to visitors that they don’t have time or see a need for anything more than you’re already giving them for free and perhaps won’t even see a need to return at all.

Domain development has been a very hot topic in the domain name world recently. One thing I’ve seen many domainers confused about is what exactly qualifies as a website and what qualifies as a minisite. When it comes to domainer-developers — those domainers developing domains, I would categorize most of the domains and all of the products offered by domain development companies aside from custom web design as being a minisite — generally not a very good one either. Calling a 5 page minisite a website is a joke — I can put up a 5 page minisite inside of a day if I wanted to and certainly wouldn’t think anything done so quickly qualifies as being anything more than a minisite. Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing wrong with minisites and I certainly wouldn’t want to pay a web developer $XXXX+ to develop a domain which isn’t even worth that much unless I had big plans. This article discusses the benefits of minisites, the types of minisites, a comparison between paid minisites to free minisites, and goes on to explain why you best choose your web developer carefully.

MFA Minisites < Quality Minisites

You know the easiest way to rank high in the SERPs? Content — lots and lots of good content, along with a good link building strategy. Have you ever built a minisite using Adsense on a domain that was previously parked? You know as well as I do that your revenue generally goes down per impression — the only way to compensate for the lower click-through rate on a Made For Adsense minisite is to drive more traffic to the site. If you increase traffic by 100% but the clickthrough rate drops by 50%, you’ve made nothing. MFA minisites really aren’t usually much better than a parked domain and are *worse* most of the time for domains getting a lot of type-in traffic (which is now converting less frequently to clicks). How many people are going to bookmark an MFA minisite? How many people are going to link to it or tell their friends and family about it?

But a minisite need not be a MFA minisite. You can have a minisite that’s 5 pages long and high in the SERPs because it has quality content that people are more than willing to link to. There’s no way most people could put out a quality minisite inside of a day — depending on what one considers quality, one might even think a week would be a short period of time to put out a minisite with 5 pages.

The one thing I would think carefully about however is the future. You can SEO a domain all day if you want, however there’s no guarantee you’ll derive any value from that in the future. Good content and quality inbound links seem like the only sure bets. At the end of the day, the future looks a lot more promising for quality minisites than it does for MFA minisites. A MFA minisite has only 2 ways to get traffic — direct navigation and search engines. If your domain gets little type-in traffic, you’re now only one algorithm change away from losing everything you’ve built.The great thing about quality websites and minisites is that you no longer depend on Google. I get around 70% of this blog’s traffic from direct navigation and inbound links — Google could take me right out of the SERPs and I would expect to still receive 70% of the traffic I was previously receiving. Who the hell wants to be Google’s slave, doing whatever their master tells them for fear of not being able to put food on the table lest they disobey him? I get 1/3rd as much traffic from Twitter alone as I do from Google, so tweet-worthy content on a minisite can very easily make up for any shortcomings in the SERPs.

I’m a big fan of niche minisites — minisites built around very specific topics. Domain development for example is a very broad topic — something that thousands of pages of content could be written around. Less broad would be SEO — it’s part of the domain development  process. We could then choose a topic from the field of SEO (eg. link building) and write a minisite about that. The more specific we get, the easier it’ll be to cover our chosen topic to the extent necessary that our minisite could become a valuable resource to people wanting information about that topic.

Free Domain Development vs Paid Domain Development

Stephen Douglas has done a great job promoting Whypark as not only an alternative to parking domains but also to paying steep minisite prices. I honestly think domainers would be better off most of the time using Whypark or another domain development platform such as Noomle rather than buying minisites. If you’re not satisfied with the results from one of these free services, you can always pay the $250 afterwards and see if a minisite from one of these domain development companies makes a difference. Starting your domain’s development using a free domain development platform should help you see whether any further development will likely be profitable or not. A lot of domainers seem to think developing their domains is some sort of domain parking panacea. Your domains making $0 parked aren’t likely going to start making $20/month parked just because you put up a few pages of content. There are a few things you may get from hiring a minisite development company to develop your domain that you wouldn’t get using a free domain development platform — link building for example. However, would you be better off going with a minisite development company or using Whypark to develop your domain and then hiring someone else to do your link building? Hard to say. One unfortunate thing is the lack success stories from all the domain development companies — aside from Whypark and Noomle, I really haven’t heard much about any of the others. Show me 100 domains you’ve developed, tell me how much the buyer was making before and after and any success you’ve had ranking sites high in the SERPs on reasonably competitive terms.

You can get excellent copywriters for 5 cents per word — five pages of 500 words is only $125, so if you’re charging me $250, what am I getting for the other $125 that’s any better than what I can get for free over at Whypark or Noomle? Some of these domain development companies aren’t building sites any better than you could do for free on Whypark, aside from the unique content and a custom header for your website. So when it’s all said and done, you’re basically paying $125 for the header, seeing as someone would have been happy to set the rest up, along with the unique content for you on Whypark for half that $250. I don’t know about you however I know more than a few competent web designers that’ll be willing to make a nice header for $25. It’s really not a very time consuming task — especially when we’re talking about a header for a minisite…

Mike Cohen from DomainMassDevelopment.com is currently running a special of 20 domains for $999. The thing I like about Mike’s domain mass development service, aside from the price is that he makes it very clear that satisfaction is guaranteed or you get your money back — when minisite development companies cost so much more than doing it yourself through Whypark or Noomle, I think it’s important that they guarantee satisfaction. Not only is it nice to have that guarantee, however it also makes you know they’re going to try their best to meet your expectations. I checked out a couple other domain development companies and couldn’t find any sort of guarantee on their sites — that’s a mistake in my opinion. Not only can you not find guarantees, however product offerings are often vague at best. What exactly is link building? If I asked 100 different people, I’d probably get 100 different answers because there are over 100 different ways to build links — so which is this domain development company using? One domain development company says they do forum posting — that isn’t link building on a nofollow forum and with how many links are everywhere in a forum, a dofollow link in a forum isn’t link building either. Directory posting… You’re kidding me right? I thought that stuff died with the dinosaurs in like 1999. Get into a few quality, selective directories like DMOZ by building a quality website. I’m not going to pay anyone to spam links to my websites on a link farm that at best won’t do my site any good and at worst might get my site penalized in the SERPs.

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting.. No mention of whether these comments are on nofollow blogs or dofollow blogs, no mention of what blogs they’ll be targeting and if they’re even relevant to your minisite. There’s no mention of link popularity and no mention about whether they’re using automated software or a published dofollow blog list to find these dofollow blogs which  would mean blog posts would probably have 50+ other comments on them and hence, offer very little link juice for your site. There’s no mention of whether these are quality, well thought out blog comments or spam that you’d be embarrassed to have your site linked to, and lastly, there’s no mention of the number of blog comments they’ll be making.

Link building and SEO according to domainers

Social bookmarking? Submitting bookmarks to unpopular dofollow social bookmarking websites is hardly link building. Article marketing? You mean like writing articles and submitting them to a site like Ezine Articles? That’s for noobs who have no better way of getting traffic to their site. The thing is, most domainers make for terrible developers — their SEO techniques might have worked well in 1999 but they won’t work well today. Many outdated web developers  all still caught up in that more links > less links mentality.  This blog had zero link building done and has PR 4 and plenty of search engine traffic. Why? Because the limited number of links I do have are mostly quality links — as in, links from other domain name blogs and reputable websites. Some of these domain development companies have made laughable mistakes in the on-page SEO of their own websites — you’d think they’d make sure their own site was properly SEO’d! I’ve said many times that I’m no expert on SEO and I’m certainly no expert on domain development…  But guess what? I’m not the one going around offering domain development services passing myself off as one. I’m not the one telling domainers about how important SEO is and that their domain development package along with their expert SEO will get you more search engine traffic than you can imagine…

Domaining and webmastering are 2 very different things and there aren’t a whole lot of people out there thoroughly experienced in both. Unlike the real world, people can pretend to be whoever they want online and with the limited transparency that exists in this industry, there are a lot of pretenders. “Domain developer” isn’t a regulated term — anyone can call themselves a domain developer. Just because someone is a good domainer doesn’t mean they’ll make a great web developer and conversely, being a great web developer doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be a great domainer. If I wanted SEO advice, I’d go see someone who specializes in SEO. If I wanted help with link building, I’d go see someone who specializes in link building. If I wanted a domain broker or domain consultant, I’d go see someone who brokers domains or offers domain consulting. If I want a web developer, I’m going to go see someone who specializes in web development. See where I’m going with this? A Jack of all trades is a master of none. If you don’t mind having an “average” job done across all aspects of domain development, by all means find yourself a Jack. Hopefully he knows more than jack shit.

Whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover is an idiot. You might not judge that book correctly by its cover, however mark my words — you will judge that book.

People can pretend they’re not shallow, that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”… Save me the politically correct bullshit because that’s all it is. We judge people every day — so much so that we may not even notice it. You might not say it but you do think it. In this world, first impressions count.

So how does this relate to domain development? If you had 2 seconds to look at a website and decide whether it would likely be of interest or not, what might you consider? Long load times, errors, expired digital certificates, and typos aren’t going to leave a positive impression. How about design — does it look professional or at least like a normal website? You certainly don’t want something that looks ugly and outdated. One thing I plan on doing in the near future once I have a bit more time on my hands is incorporating more images into the website — it’s certainly the cheapest and quickest way to improve the looks of a site. How about font, layout, and background color? If it has advertisements, do they blend in well or do they look spammy? Is it easy to tell at a glance what the website is about? How about your post titles and first few sentences — enticing enough to make someone want to read more?

Mark Fulton’s DotSauce really is a work of art — how much more aesthetically pleasing could a site be on first impression? Once you’ve impressed your website’s visitor enough to actually stay on your site long enough to start reading it, how do you encourage them to stay on or read more? For one thing, site navigation is important. My site’s really not a good example of good site navigation — again, take a look at Mark’s site for what a great website should look like.  Broken links and images tell visitors you don’t care about your website or at the very least don’t take very good care of it. Who are your visitors? How old are they? What are they looking for? Is your content appropriate for your visitors? Most of my site’s visitors are in the 18-30 range, so I need to keep that in mind when I write my content. Older visitors might on average have a longer attention span and hence be more likely to read a 3000 word post — it’s probably not a good idea to make a habit of writing 3000 word posts with a younger audience, however at the same time, I don’t want to scare away any older visitors with too many short posts or by having too much of a potty mouth. How do you engage your visitors? How do you convey authority? Why should your visitors listen to what you say? Do your posts provide enough value to encourage visitors to return again and again?

While first impressions are important, don’t make first impressions better at the expense of your other visitors — a flash intro might look pretty cool to a first time visitor to your website but you better have a way to skip the intro for return visitors who likely won’t want to watch it every time they come to your site.

I’ve always used Escrow.com for domain transactions involving escrow service and they always do a good job for me, so I never had much of a reason to try anyone else. One thing that’s always bothered me about Escrow.com is that they don’t accept Paypal for domain escrow transactions unless both the buyer and seller are in the USA. Why? I don’t know. If it’s because of the risk of people reversing payment through Paypal, I’d imagine the risk is equally high that someone could initiate a chargeback when paying with a credit card. You have a credit card authorization form signed and faxed, you’re a licensed and bonded escrow company, and you’ve been doing business for years and years — I’d think the chances of anyone successfully reversing payment would be pretty slim… Anyway, enough about Escrow.com.

I recently ended up with a buyer who wanted to make a domain name purchase through escrow using Paypal. Him being from Australia and me from Canada, it wasn’t going to happen at Escrow.com. So we chose to use EscrowDNS for a couple reasons.

1. They accepted Paypal and had no rules about where the buyer and seller had to reside.

2. They were open on weekends meaning we could speed up the escrow process by a couple days.

All of my emails were answered within 3 hours and in one case, EscrowDNS had contacted the seller just 5 minutes after I provided them with necessary information. I certainly wasn’t expecting that level of service on a $1600 transaction that was only going to net them ~$100. Not only are they open on weekends, however they truly are open 24/7 unlike the many companies who claim that but really don’t deliver it. With a 14 hour time difference between me and the buyer, it wasn’t all that easy for me and the buyer to communicate in a timely manner, however EscrowDNS did a great job of relaying what needed to be done and updating me on the current status of the transaction. So when I received an email from them yesterday announcing the latest EscrowDNS news, I thought it was about time I wrote a post about them.

EscrowDNS is offering “escrow fee free” transactions for the entire month of August, so the only fees you’ll pay are the actual payment fees and what if costs to disburse payment — might be worth marking that down on your calendar and giving them a try in August if you haven’t done so already. It’s nice having an escrow service run by domainers and made for domainers.

To the 20 or so spammers who feel compelled to try and spam my blog each day, I’ve written this post just for you. This should serve you well not only when trying to leave Viagra comments on my blog but also when you try to do it on other blogs and on non-ED forums. If you’re not a spammer, you can skip #1-9 for a few tips on how you might be able to get more out of your blog comments.

#1: Would you appreciate if someone left that comment on your blog? If you wouldn’t, don’t leave it on mine or anyone else’s. If you want to make money from your blog comments, why not join an affiliate program relevant to what the websites you’re commenting on are about — I have no problem with you using an affiliate link for your username so long as you contribute something relevant to the discussion at hand and so long as the link isn’t going to a website I don’t think my visitors would appreciate me providing links to (spam, warez/hacking, adult content, pharmaceuticals [that includes Viagra, Cialis, and Tamiflu links]) .

#2: My blog, just like 95%+ of blogs out there, is nofollow. This means no link juice will flow from blog comments. If you think spamming my blog is going to increase you’re pagerank, you’re sadly mistaken. That having been said, pagerank is only one small element in the grand scheme of things — leaving a quality blog post and a related link can add relevance and help you rank higher in the SERPs. By writing an irrelevant post, you’re doing yourself no good in the SERPs and maybe even some harm.

#3: Having read #2, don’t even think about trying this on a dofollow blog. Pretty much all blogging programs nofollow blog comments by default — if someone has installed a plugin to make their blog dofollow, it’s because they want to reward visitors who contribute valuable comments, not spammers who’ve discovered a dofollow blog list.

#4: If you’re thinking strength in numbers along the lines of “I’ll spam 1000 blogs per day and maybe a few will accept”, you’re most likely wrong. Nobody other than another spammer or someone peddling ED products is going to let a comment about Viagra go through. Even if their blog posts aren’t moderated, they’ll be sure to delete this when they notice it and if you’re looking for abandoned blogs to post your spam on, you might find that the blog owner wasn’t the only one who disappeared.

#5: If you don’t care about my blog but just want a link, write something that says otherwise. “Good post” or “I have added you to my RSS feed”  from a first time blog visitor is a dead giveaway. Read the post and write a comment related to the post so I know you’re not a spammer. It doesn’t really matter what you’re intentions behind writing the post were and I’m perfectly happy to give your site a bit of exposure if you’re willing to contribute to the discussion. I have sometimes gotten many visitors to my site from writing a genuinely useful comment on other people’s blogs — it’s another one of those quality versus quantity things. Writing good blog comments, just like making good posts on forums, allows you to build up a positive reputation, something you won’t have with readers of any blogs you successfully spam.

#6: Don’t outsource blog comment writing to someone who can’t speak English.

#7: If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. Don’t spam someone’s blog just because you want a backlink.

#8: Use your name or the name of your website, not keyword anchor text when leaving a comment. Keyword anchor text looks spammy and despite it being better for your site, it certainly isn’t better for your reputation.

#9: Don’t sign your comment with extra links to your website — it’s unnecessary and it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

#10: Try to find blogs on topics you’re interested in — it’ll be much easier to leave worthy comments on subjects you know something about than on subjects you don’t.

#11: Try to be among the first posters — these will be read by most visitors whereas other comments may not. Subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, check an RSS aggregator which features blogs you plan on posting on, or use a program which notifies you upon the creation of new posts. The same can be said about the choice of posts to comment on — comment on the most recent posts for maximum exposure.

#12: Look for blogs with a “Top Commentator” or a similar plugin that offers a backlink to those who’ve contributed the most to the blog.

#13: If you can find dofollow blogs in your niche, by all means post quality comments on them however when trying to determine what kind of link juice you’ll get from your posts, consider how many other people are leaving comments on this blog’s posts. Also, be aware that many dofollow blogs have changed to nofollow at a later date, meaning if you were only posting on dofollow blogs for the link juice, all effort has been lost.

#14: Be controversial. If you don’t agree with what’s said, say so. You might meet a few arrogant bloggers who won’t let comments through that disagree with them, however most bloggers are going to let it through and might even challenge you on your stance — it’s definitely not a bad thing and you’ve at the very least gotten the blogger’s attention regardless of whether you were right or wrong with your position.

Commenting on a blogs really is no different than forum posting — write interesting stuff that people derive value from and you’ll derive value from it as well. If you manage to get the attention of the blogger whose site you left a comment on, they might even check out your site and perhaps link back to it at some point in the future. Every blogger would like to think everyone leaving comments on their blog is doing so for altruistic reasons — that’s of course not the case, however so long as those posting comments are adding value for those who genuinely enjoy your blog, what difference does it make?

I can’t believe how many people are searching for free domain names. I was doing a bit of searching on Wordtracker today trying to find some topics to write about and couldn’t resist writing a post about free domain names… I did a Wordtracker search on “domain name” to see just what exactly people are interested in related to domain names and came up with a whopping 984 searches for free domain names. Scrolling down the list, there were 684 more searches for completely free domain registration, 504 more for absolutely free domain names, 492 more for free domain address, 350 more for free domain free registration no fees,… Totally free domain names, free domains no fees, free domain name without host and free website domain name added another 1161 free domain name searches. That doesn’t even include the people looking for cheap domain names, cheap domain registration, cheapest domain registration, cheap domains,… And then there’s pretty much all the domain name searches mentioned above with “domains” instead of “domain names”…

Since such a significant number of people seem to be looking for free domain names, let’s discuss a few ways to get free domain names in this post. The most commonly found free way to get a website online is through a subdomain (eg. domain.wordpress.com , domain.blogspot.com , etc). They might make a good choice if you’re only planning on putting up a personal blog (or website) and don’t want to worry about domain name and hosting costs. Subdomains are a bad choice if you plan to turn your website into a business at some point for a few reasons, not the least of which is getting visitors to come to your new website. Depending on who you create a subdomain with, it may or may not be possible to redirect traffic from your subdomain to your new domain name when the time comes to set yourself up on your own domain. If that’s not possible, all that link building will have gone to waste and even if you put a notice on your homepage that you’ve moved, many visitors may not notice that — especially if they’re search engine visitors or people who bookmarked their favorite pages. Your website is your brand — even if you’re not running your website, blog, etc with the goal of making a profit, you probably at the very least have a message you’d like to spread. Who do you think gets taken more seriously — the person writing on a subdomain or the person writing on a real domain name? The answer to that question really isn’t any different than the answer of who is taken more seriously between the person with a good domain and the person with a bad domain. Sure there are exceptions — people aren’t likely to stop visiting your website once you’ve established yourself because you switched to a seemingly less significant domain name, however if you have no reputation, don’t you want to build up as much trust as possible?

So we’ve looked at subdomains and why they may or may not be a fit for you. Let’s now look at free domain names — yes, there are free domain names out there. There’s one domain name extensions which always offers free domain names – Dot TK (www.dot.tk). Other than Dot TK, there are a couple others which appear to offer free domain names but are actually free subdomains on very short urls — FreeDomain.co.nr and CO.cc. Whether it’s a free domain name, a free subdomain, or even free web hosting, you can be sure there’s a catch — usually, it requires the display of third party advertisements on your website which subsidize the cost of offering free domain names, free subdomains, and free web hosting. First of all, you have no control over these third party advertisements, so they may very well be promoting services competing with yours. Second of all, the ads are usually downright fugly. I don’t know about you but I sure as heck wouldn’t put Adsense or something equally as ugly on a website I put hundreds of hours into. Third of all, these domain name extensions and subdomains are free for a reason — because nobody would be willing to pay for them. At the very least, get yourself a .info domain name when they have their $0.99 promo deals or wait for Register.com to offer free .com domain names like they do every once in awhile. If you’re that hard up for cash that you can’t afford to pay $1 for a real domain name, do yourself a favor and get a job. If you don’t have a credit card or don’t want to give out your credit card details online and that’s the reason for looking for a free domain name, open up a Paypal account and help someone out online for a few bucks. If you look at any domaining or webmastering forum, they all have a section where people offer cash for everything from forum posting, to social bookmarking, to directory submission, writing blog posts, etc — these are all things anyone can do. Free domain names aren’t worth it — like I said earlier in this article, they’re free for a reason. If you want a cheap domain name so you can try out some SEO experiments or keep your minisite costs down, just wait for a $0.99 .info special and buy all the cheap domain names you want.

I’ve talked about domain development and ways to develop domains a lot on this blog lately, however I haven’t spent any time discussing what type of websites would be best to develop. If you’re trying to build a website that will really stand out from the crowd and have a chance to be one of the best sites in it’s niche, it only makes sense to with with something niche — eg. creating a blog about domain names means your competing for visitors with 50+ other domain blogs out there, however if you pick something a little more niche, say 4 letter domains which is what this blog and my previous blog used to be about, you only have a couple competitors and it’s much easier to establish yourself as an authority.

Why would you want to establish yourself as an authority? For on thing, I’ve received a lot of links from people linking to my LLLL.com price guides — I was the first person to start actively blogging about the current state of the LLLL.com market and hence, it was relatively easy to acquire both visitors and links from people that were interested in 4 letter domains. Not interested in LLLL.coms but want to start a domain blog just the same? Why not blog about a ccTLD you like, about flipping domains, about developing domains, or news about companies important in the domain name world? Any of these are not only great topics to blog about however they also separate your blog from about 80-90% of the blogs out there and make it that much easier for yours.

It’s not necessary that you’re the very first person in a market, however if you’re the first person to make a significant entry into the market, your chances of success are much higher than people coming into the market after you. There are 2 ways to substantially limit your competition and greatly increase your chances of success:

1) Be the first significant entry into the market

2) Choose a very niche subject and build a reputation as an expert on that subject

3) Offer something radically different, better, or more efficent/cost-effective than existing competitors

If you’re able to capture the entire market before any competitors come along, it’s pretty easy to understand how you’re at a competitive advantage. There’s a strong correlation between smaller niches and higher probability of the first mover succeeding in capturing a significant portion of the market — competitors may have to win over your customers to even break-even which is an undesirable position to be in and will likely limit market participants. The one thing someone needs to be careful of when looking at entering a niche or new market is the expected size of the market. You don’t want to go so niche that the success of your website depends on external factors you have no control over or that won’t yield a respectable profit even if you capture 100% of the market.

First movers need to be careful of are what’s known as free-rider effects — someone making a late entry into your market, studying what you’ve done and finding a way to do it better. Google could be considered a good example of that in the search engine market — there were plenty of competitors already in that market however Google managed to capture the tech crowd with it’s better results and soon through word of mouth became an industry heavyweight. Even if you were to make a better search engine than Google today, you’d have a very hard time overtaking it for a few reasons — not the least of which is the enormous costs associated with building a search engine as capable as Google and finding angel investors willing to back such a project. That having been said, I’m sure most people thought that of Google when they made their market entry in 1998.

If we look at the blogging world, we can see that Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, John Chow, Mashable, etc were all among the first to enter their respective markets and hence, received a lot of extra attention they likely wouldn’t have received had they entered today instead of when they did. Not really any different than domaining — a few people manage to do okay for themselves while coming late into the game, however pretty much anyone who bought domains in the early 90s is sitting pretty.

I’ve talked about niche domaining and trendwatching before — that really is the best way to acquire a first mover advantage. What do you think is going to be popular in 2-3 years time? Niche development means you need to establish yourself as an authority before it goes mainstream — otherwise you’re just one of the many vying for market share. There are plenty of tools out there to monitor trends — check out Trend Domaining to see a domain blog dedicated to the study of trends. Another nice thing about going niche is that advertisers are getting highly targeted traffic which will no doubt yield a higher CPM than had you gone with something broader (read as: less targeted). It’ll be easier to come up with unique content because of the limited number of competitors and visitors will most likely be much more interested in what you’re writing because they’re specifically interested in the exact subject you’re covering. Another bonus of getting into a market before it really takes off is that you can easily rank high in the SERPs.

Everything I talk about on this blog seems to invariably go back to the quantity versus quality debate — do you want a lot of untargeted visitors or targeted visitors who are bound to come back day after day because your site is exactly what they’re looking for?

Domain development has never been a more popular topic in domaining circles than it is today. But what exactly is domain development? For some people, domain development means nothing short of a full-featured website while others would see a developed domain as being any domain with content on it. It doesn’t really matter what domain development means — what matters is how to best go about developing your domains.

One person asked a good question on Namepros a few days ago — How much money can you realistically make from domaining? Most newcomers jump in with both feet after hearing about domains selling for large amounts, so it was a welcomed change to see a new domainer asking for guidance. Looking through the answers given, it’s clear that many domainers are now doing or seriously considering domain development. It’s not necessarily about developing all your domains, however even earning enough off developed domains to never have to worry about renewal fees would be a nice position to be in for those with thousands of domains not covering their renewal fees. I’ve been shifting more and more towards domain development myself over the past year.. I remember DomainTools publishing a list of millionaire domainers awhile back and if you looked over the list (yes, I know it was missing hundreds of names), there were far more people who earned most of their money from developed websites than as domainers. Let’s face it — there’s good money in starting a successful domain parking, auction, registration, or resource company.

Why People Buy Domains

I’ve always seen it as follows — people are paying you $X for your domain because they believe it to be worth more than that. They might be reselling the domain, they might be developing the domain, or have other reasons for wanting the domain, however they’re never going to pay you more than the domain is worth to them. So as a domainer, you’re pretty much always selling yourself short. That’s not always the case and it’s quite possible a certain company has the resources to monetize a domain through development far better than you or I could or that the domain has value to them for reasons other than it’s development potential. Cnet was the first company to really understand this back in the mid-90s – buying domains like News.com and Download.com for a few thousand. Sure, these would be valuable domains today even if undeveloped, however how much more valuable are they granted they’re developed (redirected to a relevant subdomain of a developed website - same thing)?

Once Upon a Time Revenue Domains…

As fun as it is to tell new domainers today that there are still lots of opportunities left in domaining, reality is that there aren’t — if you’re coming in with a few hundred dollars like many past domainers did, you don’t have much of a chance. You’ll meet the odd one here or there that have made out well despite coming into domaining in 2008 or 2009, however it’s far more the exception than the norm. Even with domain prices having fallen as much as they have since 2007, they’re still far higher today than they were in years past. Many domainers talk about buying revenue domains — it sounds great that if you buy a domain for 24x rev that earns $100 per month, you’ll double your investment in 2 years.. Great until you realize it took 2 years to turn your $2400 into $4800. Are you honestly going to get anywhere in a hurry at that rate? Not unless you buy 100+ domains like that one.

Professional Domain Flipper?

Even with flipping domains, most new domainers first of all will lose money trying and second of all, will need to do one heck of a lot of successful flips if starting out with anything less than several thousand. Some people are natural domain flippers — they’re great at finding domain deals and great at reselling them at a profit. Again, more the exception than the norm if we’re talking about making a living off of it starting with a few hundred bucks. Let’s get back to the domain development topic now and if you’re a new domainer reading this post, hopefully this helped you realize that just because you’re not making much domaining doesn’t mean you can’t make money online.

How to Develop Domains

When we speak of domain development, there are 2 very different types of domain developers – those who undertake domain mass development and those who develop a few of their domains into flagship websites. Which domain development strategy is right for you? Do you have it in you to do what it takes to build an authority website – there’s a lot of work involved in first making a website popular and then keeping it popular. Minisites on the other hand are pretty easy to create and require minimal upkeep. The downside of minisites is of course that most make a fraction of what a flagship website is going to make and they’re much more dependant on search engine placement (and hence their earnings are much more likely to fluctuate wildly). Google craves consistent additions of unique content, yet how would that be possible to do with 1000 domains? It certainly wouldn’t without hiring a domain development team. Who’s to say Google doesn’t decide someday that they don’t want minisites at all in their index? Just look what happened to all those Made For Adsense sites before thinking it couldn’t happen to other minisites.

Something suggested that one develop 1000 domains that each make $10 per month — that’d be nice to earn an extra $100k or so a year once setup for doing relatively little, no? How many people do you know that have even 100 developed domains earning $10 per month? Many domainers are so terrible at domain development that they’d probably make more money if they parked their domains than they are by developing them… That doesn’t mean they can’t learn to properly develop them however. It’s a lot of work developing domains and the alternative of hiring people to develop minisites for you is prohibitively costly in most cases — If your domain is only going to make $100 per year, can you afford to spend $100 developing it? If on the other hand developing it will earn you an extra $100 per year, then it probably does make sense to hire a minisite development company to develop it for you, as you’ll be in the black after just 1 year.

Flagship Website Domain Development?

Another reason I think a few flagship websites are better than a large number of minisites is because if you focus your websites all around similar topics, then you’ll be able to convert visitors of one of your websites into visitors of another much easier than it would be to acquire that traffic through other means. This website is largely about domaining and domain development — I’m willing to bet if I created a website about web design and focused on the design elements of successfully developing a domain that more than a few people currently reading this blog would be interested in. Not only that, I could setup the sites on different servers (or using different C blocks) and I could use a PR5 website in example to make my other website a PR3 overnight.

There’s nothing wrong with starting out with minisites — minisites are a great way to get your feet wet without a lot of expenses. When you start developing flagship websites, paying for custom websites, marketing and link building costs… Speaking from experience, mistakes are costly — in my case, BQB.com was 5 figures costly, not to mention thousands more in the opportunity cost of time spent on the project that could otherwise have been spent doing something else that would have been profitable. If that was your whole domain development budget, you’re basically SOL. Hopefully it isn’t and you can view it as an expensive lesson and go on to try and build something else. That’s the one real risk trying to build a flagship website — if a minisite doesn’t work out, it really is no big deal but if a flagship website doesn’t work out, it’s a lot of time and money down the drain.

Domain Development For You

So which one is the right choice for you? In my opinion, that should largely depend on how much time you can invest in domain development. If you have a full time job and kids at home, trying to build a flagship website probably isn’t going to work out well. If on the other hand you have plenty of money you can afford to lose and plenty of time on your hands, why not give it a try after having built a few minisites to make sure development is right thing for you. Whatever you choose to do, try and develop the best domains you can. If I take this domain as an example, it was getting around 1800 uniques per month I was told from the previous owner and by the time I acquired it, about 3000 uniques per month.

It’s sure one heck of a lot easier to build a successful website when you have lots of free traffic from day one.

The media has been talking about real-time search a lot lately saying it’ll be a huge market opportunity, others going so far as to say it’ll overtake organic search as we know it today… Call me a naysayer. I’ve been predicting social media’s collapse for awhile now and have been very vocal to people I know, saying it’s one big bubble — so what do I know anyway right?

The thing with real-time search is that you’re never going to be able to prevent spam. Sure you can block results containing certain words or company names just like a blog spam filter does today, however how are you ever going to block companies tweeting (or using another service other than Twitter in the future) to microblog about themselves? There are search engine optimization strategies used by many companies to “clean” results up — basically, rank higher in the SERPs with good information about the company than critical information. Getting critical information under the first page fold means most customers aren’t going to see it. The nice thing about the progress search engines have made over the years is that they use so many variables in calculating rankings today, you’re not going to be able to outrank information just because you want to in many cases. How are you going to organize real-time search results? Are you going to list the results which have been written the most recently — as in a company could have 10 people sit at their computers and microblog good things about their company to dominate the rankings all day?

I’m sure that’s far more simplistic than reality will be, however I ask myself this — how often when I’m doing searches do I want to know what happened this very second? This isn’t hard to think of in a scientific manner.. Find a list of the keywords most searched on search engines and think about whether they’d be time- sensitive or not. If I search for “sports scores”, yeah I probably want recent information but if I search for “wood bats”, I probably don’t.

For those who don’t know, Google has a couple services themselves which while not real time are pretty close to it. The first one, Google News, delivers news from strictly reputable websites. If you type “domain” into Google, it will return all articles which have “domain” in their title from websites which have been approved by Google News. For information on domains, you’ll find Domain Name Wire in there, as well as Domain Informer and CircleID. You can do on Google News and find every single article published by Domain Name Wire in the past day, week, month, or even hour by typing: source:domain_name_wire. How much quicker do you need your domain information than that?

The nice thing about Google News is that junk isn’t allowed in there. You’re not going to find any blogs by domain newbies and you won’t even find a blog like mine in there because it’s too much opinion and not enough fact. When you’re looking for information, you generally want facts, not how someone thinks it does or should works. But what if you’d like to know people’s opinions? There’s Google Blog Search for that. Google’s Blog Search is remarkably comprehensive — just a quick look at it search for “domain” once again and you’ll find this blog, Domain Name Wire, eBusinessDomains. You can get more specific and type in say, “domain auction” and you’ll get even more relevant results and once again, more topics covering that within the past day, week, month, hour.

So what’s all this hype about real-time search? In my opinion, it’s largely unwarranted. As a niche, sure. But Google’s gotten good enough in many cases that you’ll already get what you’re looking for between it’s organic search and it’s blog search, on top of having a credible news site (Google News) which you can count on to provide accurate information — how the heck are you going to guarantee that with real time searches unless you carefully select who you allow in your search results? And if you’re going to do that, isn’t it largely going to eliminate the whole benefit of real time search and essentially make it a Google News copycat that maybe gets the information 1 hour sooner? If the people decide 1 hour is too long to wait, I’d imagine Google could trim that time to 30 minutes or even 15 minutes relatively easily with the technology they’re already using and a few more data centers to process all that extra server load.

Personally, I’ll take that 1 hour wait and get the information from a site I know and trust — how about you? And if I’m not looking for time-sensitive information, why the heck would I use a new real-time search engine over industry experts like Google and Yahoo who’ve had years to refine their search engine algorithms to deliver as accurate of results as is currently possible with today’s search engine technology?

Real-time search.. Meh. Reminds me of the hype surrounding WebTV. Probably not the popular opinion, however I see most of Web 2.0 as being a lot of fluff and not a whole lot of substance. I’ve been calling Facebook overpriced since the day analysts were tossing around a $15B valuation based on a single stake in the company being purchased by Microsoft which any idiot (aka market analyst) would have realized was for not only a 2% stake in the company but also the right to sell third party advertisements. I haven’t been following it too much since as I think the whole thing’s a joke, however I believe it’s now “valued” at $4B.

To put a domaining analogy on it, most of these social networks are like LLLL.coms — they produce minimal revenue and have a whole lot of annual costs. There’s nothing wrong with having a few but would you make a whole domain portfolio out of them? We’ve seen Myspace go from being a respectable website to a site dominated by teenage girls and spam in a span of what - 2 years? We all know how quickly things change on the Internet. In a lot of ways, social media is like domaining — there is very little transparency. Sure Twitter can throw around numbers like 10 million accounts, it’s just to bad that a recent random sample conducted on over 300,000 Twitter users by the Harvard Business School suggests 10% of Twitter users do 90% of the tweeting and and internet marketing firm Hubspot noted that 55% of Twitter users have never posted a single tweet and 56% have never followed anyone. Keep in mind that if they posted just 1 tweet in the last year, they don’t fall into this statistic. Maybe that’s why Twitter says the number of accounts rather than the number of active users — reality ain’t so rosy now is it? The attrition rate on social media (and especially Twitter) is ridiculously high, yet these companies are getting valued based on how many users they have rather than how many active users they have — the only statistic that actually matters. If someone signed up in early 2008 and hasn’t used the social network since, what’s the probability they return in the future?

It goes back to that debate of targeted traffic versus untargeted traffic. The offline world still hasn’t understood that what has value is targeted traffic, not untargeted traffic. If your social network business model revolves around selling users products or serving up advertisements, then you’re making nothing off of users who don’t sign into their account at least from time to time. When you have far more inactive users than active ones, you best look at what you’re doing wrong. According to Compete.com, Twitter’s enormous gains came to a complete standstill in May and had been looking like it would in April as well until receiving a mention on Oprah.

Don’t get me wrong — I use Twitter myself and have nothing against these social networks. It’s just these preposterous valuations that seem as ridiculous as those made a decade ago. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Wall Street’s forgotten about this recession and is already lobbying government for an unregulated carbon derivatives market. Who wants to predict the outcome of that one?

I’m one of those domainers who usually tries to avoid giving people domain appraisals at all costs whenever possible. Let’s face it, domain appraisals are rarely accurate and even if they are accurate in a reseller environment, whose to say the person asking for an appraisal will be targeting resellers or what a potential end user may be willing to pay? Unless the domainer plans on selling his domain immediately upon receiving the domain appraisal, who’s to say it will even be accurate when the time comes to sell it (eg. any 2008 domain appraisals are probably 30%+ inflated today).

That said, this post is about why you should ask for domain appraisals. I’ve seen a few other experienced domainers do this as well and I’m sure they’re not asking for an appraisal because they need help pricing their domains.. Domain appraisals are 100% free advertising. Go on a domain forum and ask for an appraisal on your domain and most of the time you’ll get 100-200 domainers view your thread — that figure doesn’t include the many more who saw your domain in the appraisal section but didn’t open the thread. Ask for an appraisal on DN Forum, ask for an appraisal on Namepros, bump up the thread saying you aren’t happy with the answers you’ve received, disagree with one of the posters just so your appraisal thread gets bumped up to the top and he’ll hopefully argue with you bumping it up to the top again, etc. I’ve bought no small number of domains having never known the domain was even for sale until the domainer listed it up asking for an appraisal. Launching a new website? What better way to get a few readers from day 1 than to ask for an appraisal of the domain or for people to review your website? You might want to make your domain appraisal thread titled “domain dot com” rather than domain.com to avoid the possibility of search engines picking it up in the event you get appraisals below your expectations. If the domain appraisals you receive were above your expectations, be sure to link to that thread to show any interested domainers what other domainers thought the domain was worth.

Don’t let anyone con you out of your money with a paid directory submission service, although if you still see value in having your websites submitted to 1000 irrelevant directories, perhaps you deserve it!

I think the SEO world needs a new rule – anyone who struggles to create a PR2 website is allowed to give out SEO advice – that would weed out 90% of the posers right there. Heck, I still consider myself a newbie and I know far more than 90% of these wannabee SEOs calling themselves SEO consultants. I’ve always thought of it as follows — if you were really as good as you say you are, why wouldn’t you be building your own websites instead of offering SEO consulting services? Business.com used to give out business advice and now that they’re bankrupt, I can’t help but remember the comment one domainer mad – who would take advice from a company which can’t even stay afloat while owning the domain name  business.com? As they say, hindsight is always 20/20 and I don’t think anyone would be coming for business advice today! Exceptions in the SEO world would obviously apply for the guys charging their customers thousands per day which customers are happy to pay because they deliver results.

Very Bad SEO

Sam’s Club has SEO services starting at just $30 per month.. I don’t know which is scarier – the fact that Sam’s Club is offering SEO services for $1 per day or the fact that people buy into this and actually think they’re getting SEO. Even half decent outsourced SEO isn’t going to work for anywhere near $1 per hour, let alone per day! Submitting your website to 1000 directories is so 1999.. A lot of SEOs talk trash about social bookmarks but I’ve had far better results paying people to bookmark my sites than I’ve ever gotten with mass directory submissions — at least with social bookmarks if you pay enough people (or the right people), you’ll make out okay for yourself. I only do paid social bookmarking myself on sites where the ToS says it’s okay — even playing by the rules, you can get a sizable amount of traffic from Delicious. Social networks are largely short term low quality traffic and you’d likely be better off building something for the long term but if you’re the kind of guy who thinks directory submission services are going to get you good traffic…

Good Architectural SEO

One thing I’ve been working on over the past day is architectural SEO — helping search engines better navigate my blog. Every link a search engine has to go through to get to my content gives less link juice than the previous one — this penalizes content which takes more links to access.  Most SEOs believe there’s a damping factor of around 85% (based on an old paper from Google’s founders which may or may not be accurate today) – this means that even if there’s only one link from one page to the next (which is highly unlikely), you’d only get 85% of the pagerank that the first page has. This would seem to suggest I should perhaps use 2 pages and link 90 posts to each of them or alternatively, set up categories and put links to all relevant posts in those categories. I like the latter option more myself — mainly because my blog posts are on a variety of topics and I doubt an article about SEO is viewed as being relevant to a post of mine such as “How to Incorporate a Business” — maybe if it was how to incorporate an SEO business.. Wordpress without SEO friendly plugins or modifications is bad SEO — the fact some claim Wordpress is almost perfect SEO right out of the box shows how much about SEO people still need to learn. The way Wordpress links posts makes your newest posts appear on your homepage and your oldest posts appear far away from the homepage. Unless all your oldest posts are your worst ones, that’s likely not an ideal SEO configuration. But that’s not the half of it – having a navigational link at the bottom to go from page 1 to page 2, having the same thing displayed on the homepage as on the single post page (unless using excerpts), having the same thing displayed in categories and in the archives. Very bad SEO.

Choosing Keywords

I currently have roughly 180 posts — do I want to have 180 posts with a tiny bit of link juice flowing to each or maybe 20 better posts with much more link juice flowing to each? The right/wrong answer to that question will depend on my blog. If I’m going after keywords/keyphrases with very little keyword competition, I might very well be inclined to categorize my posts and subsequently link to them all almost equally. If on the other hand I’m going after a few more competitive keywords/keyphrases, it only makes sense to try to push as much link juice as possible to those pages. One way to do  Google cracked down on pagerank sculpting recently (Matt Cutts) announcing changes were made to the way the nofollow attribute is handled by Google, making nofollow links act as a link sink. This hardly does anything to impact the other way to sculpt pagerank however – with Google placing increasing importance on link relevance, they’re basically rewarding you for strategic linking and with pagerank today overshadowed by more important factors such as global link popularity and relevance, coming down hard on the nofollow part of pagerank sculpting may very well be a blessing in disguise, encouraging people to better organize their content which will be of benefit to not only search engines but also visitors.

I want to rank my blog for ”domain development” in example — it’s not something super competitive like trying to rank for say, “SEO”, however it’s desirable enough that some companies are willing to pay for sponsored links and at least one person (Mike from WannaDevelop.com) is spending good coin to rank well for it. Obviously any company in the domain development business wouldn’t mind ranking for “domain development” and if you look through the pages on Google, you should see some familar companies such as Whypark and AEIOU.com for example. One great plugin I’ve found for this is the Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP) for Wordpress. If you stick to one topic like say domain development or SEO, it does a very good job at returning other articles on domain development or SEO, however when you make a post like I’ve made here and bounce around talking about domain development one minute and SEO the next, it has a bit of trouble determine which posts are more relevant. Another one I’ve found great has been SEO Smart Links — you’ll notice that whenever I say “domain development” in a post, the first instance of it always links to a particular post on domain development — isn’t that a creative idea to tell Google which page I want to rank well in the SERPs for domain development with? So long as your posts which mention domain development are actually at least to a certain extent about domain development, it’ll help establish relevance. Saying something like “Oh yeah, I forgot to work on domain development” at the end of a post about how great your weekend was isn’t going to help much unfortunately.

Wordpress SEO

What I plan on doing is putting 20 or so links on my homepage to the posts I view as being most valuable. In addition to this, I’m going through all my 180 posts and getting rid of (or merging)  posts which have gotten me zero search engine traffic and are hence just wasting link juice which could be better spent elsewhere. Finally, I’ll set up a sitemap so that at the very least all pages will be indexed, something which likely wouldn’t otherwise happen once I get rid of the link at the bottom of the homepage to view past posts — this will solve any duplicate content issues and I’ll never have to worry about writing post excerpts as there’s only going to be one way to get to any of the posts, having done away with every other method Wordpress provides of accessing posts. Looking underneath my blog post titles on the homepage, you’ll notice I’ve removed some information, such as the “Filed under: Category name” — why the heck would I want to waste pagerank promoting category pages in every blog post? I’m debating whether I should get rid of the comment hyperlink — someone would of course still be able to get to the comments by clicking on the post title, however I have a feeling some people may be more or less inclined to view and/or post comments based on knowing how many there are.

A few more things to mention for the SEO newbie’s newbie:

1 - If you don’t know what PageRank is, do yourself and everyone else a favor and look it up on Wikipedia — they have a nice pretty graph with complicated math formulas that will  keep you thinking for hours.

2 - PageRank isn’t near as important as it used to be. You need relevant links with good anchor text (with relevant text nearby) and descriptions from quality websites. Thinking that a PR4 is always better than a PR3, that a PR4 is equal to a PR4, or that two PR4 websites with the similar relevance, anchor text, descriptions from quality websites will yield similar results are all not necessarily true. Your domain development website being listed in a PR3 page of a directory right beside 100 porn sites is just oozing with relevance — NOT.

3- PageRank is actually calculated out of 100, however Google’s given it a 10 point system so simpletons would have an easier time understanding the concept which doesn’t appear to have happened despite this. That means when the Google toolbar (which nobody even knows if it is how Google actually measures PageRank or if they just created it to keep SEOs busy) reports your website as being PR4, it’s likely not actually PR4, and may be PR4.1, PR4.4, PR4.5 etc.   This is straight from Wikipedia, so it has to be true: “PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page.” So if there’s 10 links on one page and 1000 links on the other, which do you think has a better chance of randomly being clicked on and arriving at your page? That’s not a trick question. Make a quality website and get listed in a few quality directories like DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. There’s no amount of PR1 directories that will amount to anything — they’re probably giving you negative PR or maybe the engineers at Google think it’s such a pathetic attempt for PageRank that they’ll let your website keep it’s miserable existence as a PR1.

4 - Homepage PageRank is just that — Homepage PageRank. When you do an article or directory submission, how often is your link ever on the homepage? It doesn’t matter if the homepage is a PR 10, what matters is what the pagerank of the page the link to your website is on, in addition to everything already mentioned.

Good Wordpress SEO

One thing I have to get around to doing one of these days is ordering a custom blog design or getting off my lazy behind and doing it myself — nobody likes linking to a free template. All I changed so far was the H1 tag color from blue to green — looks a lot better in my opinion already! Another thing I changed earlier today was the functionality of the sidebars — they now only display on the homepage. Be sure to have plugins in place to handle automatic 301 redirects and redirect 404 error page to your homepage to preserve link juice. This next tip isn’t really SEO but seeing as the whole purpose of SEO is to get more visitors / targeted visitors to your website, I guess it goes without saying that the most important thing to do is to make sure your site stays online. I have a pretty decent VPS however it crashed on a couple occasions and went mighty slow when I had too many plugins enabled — most notably bandwidth heavy ones which are rewriting stuff on the fly and surprisingly, Intense Debates plugin for comments. You might want to keep an eye on your Wordpress database as well — I don’t know much about servers, however something was bloating the hell out of mine. Thankfully the folks at Liquid Web fixed the problem without me even asking. One plugin which further helped with database load was the “Revision Diet” plugin, available at Wordpress.org/Extend. This plugin let’s you specify how many revisions you want stored so your database doesn’t get bloated with unnecessary post revisions. I really need to get my RSS feed link back on my homepage, however I must admit that I’m quite happy with how much scraping has gone down since I took it off. Apparently there are some clever ways to deal with that — one AntiLeech Wordpress plugin goes so far as to give the scrapers not only fake content but also put links on that fake content back to your site! Probably not something you’d want to try on a new site due to Google possibly thinking you’re a spammer but for more established sites, there’s nothing like a little revenge.

Paid Links, SEO, and Monopoly

And contrary to what any SEO will tell you, the best SEO strategy is to produce “good” content (other than buying links if you have the money and accept the risks). Isn’t that a no brainer? Just ask yourself why Google is coming down so hard on some paid link buyers.. It’s because their stupid pagerank formula has one gigantic flaw in that there’s no way in hell it can detect most paid links, so Google resorts to threats and BS about how good their “paid link detecting algorithms” are. Yeah, I’m sure. Because I see paid links on like 1/2 the websites I go to.  So you can buy paid links or you can do what Matt Cutts recommends and create linkbait which in my opinion is most of the time more manipulative than paid links — creating false and/or slanderous content just because some bloggers are dumb enough to link to that kind of stuff — that’s what Google recommends? I’d rather buy paid links than pull a David Letterman but apparently Google would prefer you make  jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter getting knocked up by… I won’t go there — that family has enough issues as it is. The only solution is something Google doesn’t want to address — devalue all links because pagerank was flawed from day 1.

Links are a fundamental part of the Internet and now with Google going so far as to change how nofollow is handled such that all links are penalized, Google is essentially punishing any and every link not bought from them. Hmm… Seeing as the domain world has been ranting and raving about monopolistic behavior the past couple days, I gotta ask you guys — don’t you think not allowing paid links is anti-competitive behavior against all the third party link sellers? I just did a google search on the matter and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. Paid links would get rid of the large majority of spammers, scrapers, and those gaming the SERPs with advanced SEO techniques. How different is it than how their Adwords works right now — he who pays most gets the top result? Does that result in spam? I wouldn’t think much more than organic search results do and it could easily be addressed with new usage guidelines. Oh yeah, but then I forgot.. If I buy my link from someone other than Google, then Google makes no money off of it! So yeah, let’s pretend paid links are really bad but all we actually want to do is preserve our little monopoly and throw a little temper tantrum and blackmail anyone who ponders defying us. Do no evil indeed. Like I said earlier in the post, I don’t buy paid links but I don’t see anything wrong with doing it. Sorry for getting a little off-topic at the end.

edit: This has been amicably resolved.

Since all the domain name blogs seem to be talking about it, I thought I’d add my take on it as well. I have to say, I completely agree with Elliot about Domaining.com. So long as Domaining.com isn’t breaking any laws, Francois can do whatever he wants to do with his site — it’s his site. Francois has been kind enough to include me and many other bloggers on his RSS aggregator and I receive more traffic to my blog from Domaining.com than I even do from Google – thousands of visitors for free… Francois owns a business and when he’s offering a service to us bloggers for free, it’s understandable that he would ask that we not promote competitors. If we choose to, it’s our choice — just like he has the choice to no longer display our feed.

I was one of the people who also received a notice from Francois to remove the Namebee banner ad from my website and I did so. Domaining.com really has brought the domain industry closer together and alllowed many of us who can’t find time to attend domain conferences the opportunity to meet domainers who we likely wouldn’t otherwise have had the chance to meet. I’m very surprised by some of the comments circulating on some of the domain blogs.. You may not agree with the decision and that’s fine – you’re entitled to your opinion as well, however do you really need to bad mouth someone who has done so much for the domain industry?

If you want to get a small business loan at some point for your Internet business, you may be asked for a business plan. Regardless of  how big or small your domain name, website development, or other online business  is and even if you have no ambition of turning your hobby into a business or are loaded enough you’ll never have to worry about loans, you still need an Internet business plan. When I speak of having an Internet business plan, I’m referring to a plan of action which you will outline and undertake so that you’ll be able to achieve the goals you’ve set for your Internet business. If you haven’t set any goals for your Internet business, you best get started on that now. How will you go about achieving your business goals if you don’t even know what they are? Set short term goals and make a list of long term business goals for your Internet business . If you’ve never written a business plan before, you’re probably wondering how to set and achieve your goals. We’ll get back to talking about writing a business plan for your Internet business a little later in this article — let’s look at some tips on what needs to be done before writing a business plan.

Tips on Setting Goals

When writing a business plan for your Internet business, choose SMART goals — goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s first go over these goal attributes. A specific goal should descriptively outline the goal and how to achieve your set goal. If we take my goal of making this blog a PR5, I could for example say that I will make a serious effort to increase the number of posts per month. Stop right there — do you see what’s wrong with setting that goal? It’s not specific. Saying you’ll increase the number of posts per month doesn’t tell me whether you’ll be increasing the number by 1 or 100. A specific goal would be to say you will put out 1 post per day or 30 posts per month — that’s measurable, it’s attainable, it’s certainly a realistic goal which could be achieved, and we’ve included a time element (posts per day or posts per month). What sense would it make to choose a goal irrelevant to the success or improvement of your Internet business? Let’s discuss different types of goals which may be relevant to our business.. One might be to increase customer satisfaction or to increase the number of repeat buyers by 10% over the next 6 months – both of these goals are fairly easy to make measurable by asking customers if they’re satisfied with the service they received both now and 6 months from now and by tracking the number of customers who made purchases on multiple occasions. Goals on the web development front may include reducing your website’s bounce rate (the number of people only visiting one page on your website before leaving), to increase the number of page views from your average visitor (eg. making visitors more interested in your website), or to increase site traffic and revenue (by perhaps focusing on making more revenue per visitor). We can add in specific and measurable elements to these goals, as the above examples have done to make them good goals to set. The goal of a business plan isn’t to set goals that are easy just so we can achieve them and pat each other on the back — we can set hard time-bound goals, however they should be possible to achieve with the knowledge, skills, and resources you have available at your disposal.

I talked about time-bound goals a bit at the beginning of this post when talking about having short term goals and long term goals — a business does need to have both to ensure they’re going in the right direction. With Internet businesses, short term goals are much more important than long term goals — the Internet continues to rapidly evolve and businesses who rely on it need to evolve with it. Try to set long term goals that are adaptable. Long term goals lacking adaptability are destined to fail. Thinking too far ahead of yourself leads people to do silly things, as we saw during the Dotcom Bust — it’s unrealistic to assume traffic, revenue, etc will continue to grow at a certain rate indefinitely because they’re growing at that rate now and setting long term goals with such an assumption made is setting yourself up for failure. When you set a goal, think of all the ways you could go about achieving that goal. If I take my goal of getting to PR5 as an example, I could say that I’ll focus on continuing to write good content, link building, optimizing my internal link structure, and networking — I’ve left myself a few different options here which allows me to adapt to any unforeseen circumstances which may arise. Make goals positive — it’s much more effective to put a positive spin on any goal than a negative one and if you have more than one goal, prioritize them. Be sure to write your goals so that you’re personally accountable for failure. Why not take that a step further and tell all your friends and website’s visitors what your goals are — won’t that make you feel stupid if you’re unable to live up to the expectations you created? But at the same time, could anything possibly be a better driving force to stay on task and accomplish your goals?

Steps to Prioritize Tasks

The Pareto Principle applies to business plans as well — Can you get 80% as good of results or 80% of your tasks done using just 20% the time? Time management is an extremely important part of goal setting. If you have only a limited amount of time to achieve your goals, then every second you can save is another second you can use towards achieving your goals. Remember to never forget about opportunity costs — if you have 2 goals of equal importance and one will take twice as long to accomplish as the other, it only makes sense to start with the easier goal. Just remember here that we’re choosing the easier goal because we assumed both goals were of equal importance — if the harder goal was of greater importance, taking the easy way out may not be the right choice to make. Prioritizing goals is simple — determine which goals are urgent, followed by which goals are important and so on until you arrive at goals you’d like to accomplish time permitting. This need not solely be applied to business plans nor should it — prioritizing job tasks is an important task for any manager and any worker who can’t grasp the concept of prioritizing job tasks probably isn’t going to last very long. You did it when you had a real world job — bring those prioritization strategies to your Internet business, your Internet business plan, and more importantly, both your online and offline lives. I have several articles about time management on this blog and I intend on adding more in the future because of how important to success it is. If you can learn better time management skills, you’re halfway to success already. Want to learn where you’re wasting time? Write down everything you do during the day and do that for a few days. Then, analyze your list and look for areas where you could improve efficiency. You can apply this idea to business, weight management (eg. Weight Watchers), or good budgeting. When prioritizing tasks, write them down with the same level of detail as when you first identified goals in your business plan.

Writing Action Plans

Now that we’ve written down or goals, elaborated on them, prioritized them, and thought up possible ways we could go about achieving our goals, it’s time to put it all together. Organize all your ideas for how you’re going to go about achieving your goals and then turn them into actions — the whole who, what, when, where, and why. What will be your operating expenses? How are you going to turn a profit? What are you going to do about advertising and otherwise marketing your business? If there are more than just you involved in your Internet business, write down the tasks everyone will have and who will be responsible for achieving which goals.

Website Business Plan

If you were a bank manager, would you lend someone money who had come in presenting your business plan? If not, your business plan isn’t good enough. The fact that your business is an internet business means it’s going to be even harder to secure a small business loan (and this economy isn’t helping either) – especially if your business plan isn’t up to snuff. If you’re targeting outside investors, be sure they’re aware of the financial and legal liabilities associated with your business. Non-disclosure or non-compete agreements may sound like a good idea, however do keep in mind that by doing so you’re telling the person you’re asking for money that you don’t trust them. You’d probably be better off leaving out any information you don’t want others to know rather than make them sign such a legal agreement. A few more things you should cover in your business plan include:

Background information — This is more for anyone reading your business plan rather than for yourself. If you aren’t seeking any form of financing and merely want a clear strategy to follow, you can leave this part out. The same can be said about having an executive summary — you can summarize some of the key problems and challenges your business is facing, it’s current financial situation, and a strategic framework that identifies opportunities for your Internet business. You’ll want to have a vision statement outlining the direction your business will be taking and it’s primary objectives, along with a mission statement explaining the reason for your company’s existence, your projected profitability, estimates of growth, and your target market. You’ll need to assess the risks, competition, and barriers to entry you face as best possible. Do you have a contingency plan or method to limit financial liabilities in the event things don’t proceed as planned?

There are many business plan support services available in most countries — a google search should identify government agencies providing small business services in your area.  There are plenty of Internet business plan templates available online as well. It may seem like a daunting task, however writing a business plan for your Internet business is something well worth undertaking. They say you should dress not for the job you have but for the job you want — does your Internet business not deserve to be treated seriously today?

Listed below are a few of the good SEO strategies I’ve employed, some of the good SEO strategies I’m currently working on, and some of the good SEO strategies I plan on implementing in the near future. Part of the article is targeted at the Wordpress platform, however most of it is applicable to any website requiring search engine optimization. If you’re not doing these things, chances are you’re doing bad SEO.

• Permalinks – When people google a keyphrase you rank well for in the SERPs, you’ll have that extra edge that they’ll click your link because your url is more inviting (read as “SEO optimized”) and gives them a better idea of what they’ll find on your page. I’m still working on getting all my urls changed over to permalinks — if you’re starting a new blog, it’s best to start with them from the beginning rather than worry about them afterwards and making sure you 301 redirect everything to avoid losing link juice. I chose to use /domains/%postname%/ for my permalink structure — anything you choose will be better than the Wordpress default permalinks, but ideally choose something which helps readers understand what your post will be about — having the post name in your permalink structure is particularly good for that.
• Post Excerpts — Wordpress blogs are notoriously bad for duplicate content — if you don’t have post excerpts written, you’re showing the exact same thing on your homepage, in your categories, and in your archives — this is horribly bad for SEO. Not only are you doing your visitors a disservice by doing this but you’re also asking for trouble from Google. Writing post excerpts is another one of those SEO strategies you’re best starting on day one — try adding post excerpts to 180 posts after the fact like I’ve been working on and it takes a surprisingly long time (eg. 150 words per post excerpt x 180 posts = 27,000 words). And yes, just like most of you new bloggers, I said to myself “I’ll worry about post excerpts later on” and now I have hours upon hours of post excerpts to write, however it will be well worth the SEO benefits.
• Title tag SEO — A good post title isn’t necessarily a good title tag. With the title tag having perhaps more weight than any other on-page SEO factor, it would be wise to spend time carefully thinking about your website’s SEO strategy and how you’re going to go about realizing that SEO strategy. What you decide to do with title tags may very well depend on how you currently rank in search engines for keywords and keyphrases you’re trying to rank for. I already rank #1/2 for “LLLL.com” on Google for example, so I should either use a different word in my titles or I should use a keyphrase including “LLLL.com” that I do not rank #1/2 for. The  bad SEO Wordpress default title syntax is “Blog Name | Post Name” — this order should at the very least be reversed and you may consider doing like me and removing the blog name entirely. If you’re a company or well known website, you should leave it in but if you’re just a little guy like me and already rank #1/2 for your blog name, you’re just adding in clutter that might confuse or encourage search engine visitors into clicking a different link. The title tag is what shows up as the blue hyperlink when someone searches for your site in the search engines — these people may not have the least clue what your website is about, so having a descriptive, search engine optimized title is a must if you want them to choose your site over the others listed in the SERPs. Each title tag should be unique for a few reasons — for one thing, Google will most likely only rank you twice for a given keyword or keyphrase, so having 10 posts with the same title isn’t going to help search engine optimization. A second reason is that you may very well confuse Google — if you have 10 posts titled the exact same thing — which two should Google rank? You might end up inadvertently removing one of your own posts from the SERPs and it being replaced with a post much less desirable.
• Post/Article Archives — Talk about a link juice stealing SEO nightmare! Why on earth would anyone want dates listed as anchor text on every page of their website? Is having “December 2008″ for anchor text going to help you rank better in the SERPs for anything other than December 2008? Why would you want to rank for a date unless you’re trying to have bad SE? If you don’t have a good answer to that question, do yourself a favor and get rid of the archives — they’re completely redundant when Wordpress already allows you to organize your posts by category anyway. Wouldn’t a visitor looking for information on how to develop domains have a much better chance of finding what they’re looking for if they browsed my domain name development section than my December 2008 archive?
• Relevance –  Ideally, your posts should be written about a limited set of topics (this one being about good SEO and bad SEO for example). Having interrelated topics with each post having a clear, well-defined topic and keyword focus will help establish relevance. If you have an SEO category on your website, make sure that only posts related to SEO go in there. Not only will this help search engines get a better idea of what your posts are about, but you’ll also be helping visitors find what they’re looking for. Until I find time to properly categorize my posts, I’m placing most of them as “Uncategorized” — it’ll be much easier to fix that than put them in a whole bunch of different categories only to decide to change that at some point.
• URL Canonicalization — I’m not sure which genius came up with such a long and scary word for such a simple concept — canonicalization basically means there should only be one url address to access your homepage (or any other page on your website for that matter) from. One common canonicalization issue is being able to access the homepage from www.domain.com and domain.com.  Choose one url for your homepage and 301 redirect the other (or others) to it. Another common cause of canonicalization issues is when different protocols (such as http and https) are used. Canonicalization problems may result in duplicate SEO penalties. If there are multiple urls by which your homepage can be accessed, then multiple pages will be splitting your homepage’s pagerank.
• Other On-Page Optimization — Header tags, bold, and italic text will help make your page scannable and more visually appealing, while at the same time helping search engines determine what’s important on your page. I don’t like italicizing text myself — I have a hard time seeing the difference from ordinary text, however bold text and h1 and h2 tags do a great job of getting the attention of visitors. Keyword density isn’t as important as it used to be, however you should still use the word several times on the page.  I don’t use any keyword density tools myself — I write in natural language and however many times I end up using a particular keyword is how it ends up.  If  my article doesn’t seem to be ranking as well in the SERPs as I think it should (like this article on good and bad SEO), I’ll go back and see what I  can change. Using synonyms for the keywords you’re trying to rank for gives you the possibility to rank for more keywords and adds further relevance to your content. Something else worth mentioning — make a serious effort to post once per day or at least on a consistent basis. There’s not much Google lovers more than fresh, new content.
• Internal Link Popularity –  There are plugins for Wordpress available that nofollow all blogroll links and others that dofollow your blog’s homepage while they nofollow all other pages on your blog (the Blogroll SEO Wordpress plugin comes to mind). There are differing opinions out there at present on what exactly Matt Cutt’s comment about pagerank sculpting no longer working means for the SEO community. As Josh said on my blog yesterday, reducing pagerank sculpting by having rel=”nofollow” act as a pagerank sink is plausible, however if Google were to treat both rel=”nofollow” on external links and rel=”external nofollow” the same way, blogs like this one are basically going to get killed in the SERPs from all those nofollow blog comments. Sure you could remove the hyperlinks or take out commenting functionality completely, however that really seems a little extreme and ridiculous. Moving on now, another thing to be on the lookout for are broken links.If you’re using Wordpress, there are broken link plugins that’ll check for broken links for you — for the most part, you can find whatever you’re looking for in a Wordpress plugin by typing that in on the Wordpress.org/extend plugin page. If not using Wordpress, just google “broken link checker”. Site navigation is very important to SEO. Try to make every page of your blog or website accessible by clicking as few links as possible — if you have a category page and then a subcategory page, and then a subcategory of that subcategory page, you’re depriving many of your posts of a whole lot link juice. The default way Wordpress organizes posts punishes posts for being old by making them further removed from your homepage (which is most likely your page with the highest pagerank). If you have some good old posts, you’ll want to find some sort of link structure that makes them more easily accessible — that might be the creation of a sitemap or perhaps by placing a “top posts” category on your homepage, or even stickying your top posts as the first posts to show up when someone browses the homepage or one of your categories. With social media as powerful a driver of traffic as it is today, put the Sociable Wordpress plugin (or another social media plugin) on your Wordpress blog. Most of the big social media websites make it easy for you to put text or image links on your website that will allow visitors to quickly submit your articles. It only takes a few seconds to add search engine friendly alt and title tags to your images. If you’re linking to an image, use relevant anchor text just like you would with any other link. I use Platinum SEO and SEO Smart Links Wordpress plugins to help out with internal linking and link optimization. When linking to internal pages on your website, use relevant anchor text. You can help Google realize which of your pages are more important by pointing more relevant anchor text from other pages on your site to the pages you view as being more important.
• Global Link Popularity — You know you have a good site, I know you have a good site, but if you don’t have links coming to your site, Google might not even know you exist. Despite Google claiming to have 200+ ranking factors, it’s pretty clear that some of them such as pagerank, quality inbound links and the relevance of those inbound links are worth far more than others. If you want to rank high in the SERPs for a competitive keyword you’ll need more than just a high pagerank. Something I haven’t gotten around to doing yet is submitting my blog to relevant directories and RSS aggregators. I’m listed in DMOZ, however I still want to get listed in the Yahoo Directory, Best of the Web, JoeAnt, maybe a few other quality directories, some relevant blog directories, and lastly, I plan on incorporating my blog as a business so I can get into quality business directories. RSS aggregators are well worth looking into as well — Domaining.com, an RSS aggregator for the domain name industry, sent me over 2000 visitors in May. Even pointing relevant links to other websites may help. Getting links from high PR websites is hard, however it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask — the worst they can do is say no. Linkbait — create something people would want to link to. If you do a Google search on it, there’s plenty of advice — everything from calling out another blogger to spending hours upon hours writing a post that nobody reading your blog will forget (or at least hopefully not the people you want linking to you). Despite many people saying they don’t like long blog posts, a long informative blog post seems to stand a much higher probability of getting links than a shorter post — that’s been my experience at least. Your post does have to have enough content on it that someone views it as being linkworthy. Obviously the longer the post is, the larger the probability that someone likes something written on the page enough to share it with their readers. Linkbait isn’t necessarily written to please your readers but to get the attention of  fellow bloggers or other people in a capacity to link out or otherwise help you (eg. by digging your  post) — that said, if you can please both, you really have the best of both worlds. I prefer the long and very informative linkbait approach myself — worst case scenario, you have a great post that readers will enjoy and you’ll get plenty of long tail traffic for many years to come. Other thoughts.. Be sure to put a related post plugin on your blog or link to related posts on your website — not only is this good for SEO, however it’s also good for keeping visitors on your website for longer and reduce your site’s bounce rate, something my website is notoriously bad for with posts so long people only have time to read one! Another thing I want to do to help out with getting external links is to put a “Link to me” plugin on my homepage — it’s another one of those things that can’t hurt and can only help. If you’re just starting out, you can get some links by posting on dofollow blogs — do those bloggers and yourself a favor and leave constructive comments, not that “Hi great post” spam they all get 100 times per day. If someone has a dofollow blog, it’s because they chose to have a dofollow blog and to reward posters — they’re not going to reward spammers, as it’s just going to encourage more spammers to come spam them.

It’s been said on more websites than I can count but it bears repeating — write for your website for your visitors, not search engines. If visitors enjoy your website’s content and choose to link to it, you’ll likely end up ranking well for your keyphrases at the end of the day anyway, plus your visitors won’t have to suffer through reading search engined optimized spam. While writing exclusively for search engines is a bad idea, doing keyword research and structuring your sentences in a way that gives you the best chance of ranking well in the search engines is a great idea. Oftentimes you can say the same thing in 2 or 3 different ways, so choosing the most SEO friendly way of saying it only makes sense if you’re aware of it. I’ve found using natural language quite effective for long tail SEO.

Keyword research is of critical importance to any successful SEO campaign. I can’t understand why people don’t spend more time on keyword research — I certainly find it much easier than other SEO strategies like link building which are to a certain extent out of your control. Webmasters and SEOs can talk about link building and pagerank all they want but if you target the wrong keywords, it’s not going to matter. For whatever reason, many bloggers seem to obsess and optimize their websites around keywords which have the most searches in their niche. Anyone whose developed a domain before and seen the results of doing this knows this isn’t a viable SEO strategy — it’s a classic example of bad SEO.

One of my favorite uses of keyword research is in finding post ideas. Why waste time trying to guess at what readers may be interested in when I can find out exactly how many people out there have been searching for information on a particular topic? I can then analyze my keyword competition to try and find a topic which I have a chance of ranking for or I might choose a topic I probably can’t rank for, however I know a lot of my readers will be interested in. Keyword research is an exercise in opportunity cost — optimizing your post a bit for search engines is sure to help, however if you research every single word you write in your blog post to ensure you get the maximum SEO benefits, you’ll have one great search engine optimized post, but probably could have written several pretty good ones in the same timeframe. Depending on what you’re trying to rank for, either may be the optimal strategy. Website visitors will most certainly prefer 10 posts over one that reads the exact same to them but reads a little better to search engines. Even if you can’t rank for a particular keyword, visitors might very well link back to you, tell friends and contacts to check the article out, etc — it’s not like SEO is all there is to having a successful website, although it certainly does help.

Just like many domainers, domain developers often fail to grasp the difference between traffic and targeted traffic — SEO to them is about being ranked #1 in the SERPs for a highly competitive search query, not necessarily a search query which will convert. Do you just want a better Alexa rating so you can trick some foolish advertiser into advertising on your site or do you genuinely want to attract visitors interested in what you’re writing about? If you just want more visitors, then by all means find keywords and keyphrases which have the greatest difference between keyword/keyphrase searches and perceived keyword/keyphrase competition.  If you’re looking for targeted traffic on the other hand, scrap that idea that more visitors are better than less and find yourself keywords and keyphrases that you think you’ll be able to rank for and which will deliver you targeted traffic.  The first step towards targeted traffic is to look at your business and your customers (or visitors). Make a list of keywords and keyphrases which accurately describe your business/website. I might say for this blog that “domain development” is relevant keyphrase. Once you’ve made a list, go over each individual term and find synonyms for it — domain development in example could lead to “developing domains” or even “help developing domains”. Once you’ve made a nice long list of keywords and keyphrases, put them in your favorite keyword research tool (eg. Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Google Keyword Tool) and you should end up with a list of relevant keywords and keyphrases that you could create posts around. Regardless of which keywords and keyphrases you decide to optimize your pages around, you’d be wise to not forget about long tail search queries. Roughly 20% of search engine queries have never before been entered — I’ve received a ton of traffic for some keyphrases that Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery report as having no searches and had hundreds of keyphrases last month that sent me 1-3 uniques each. It doesn’t sound like much but a couple uniques here and there add up when you have hundreds of them. Long tail keyphrases are often much more targeted — eg. something along the lines of “cheap new york lawyer” might get only a handful of searches per year, however if you’re a lawyer in New York and fit the searcher’s idea of cheap, it might prove to have been a very lucrative keyphrase to optimize your website for.

To get a good idea of who you’re going to be up against, try doing a search on Google as followed: intitle:keyword phrase , where the keyword phrase is to be replaced by the particular keyphrase that you are trying to rank for. This will show all websites that have the keyword phrase you’re targeting in their title. If you want to be even more specific, you could do a search on Google as follows: intitle:”keyword phrase” , where the keyphrase is once again your particular keyphrase that you’re trying to rank for. With the quotes this time, we can see all websites that have an exact match in their title for the keyphrase we’re trying to rank for. By using intitle:”keyphrase” inanchor:”keyphrase” ,  we can see how much real keyword competition we have — people who are most likely trying to rank high in the SERPs for the same keyword as us. Use link:domain to see everyone who’s linked to a keyword competitor’s website (or even your own if you want) to get a better idea of what you’re up against and by using site:domain (where domain once again represents your domain name or the domain name of a competitor you would like to know more about) and you’ll get a list of all the indexed pages on your competitor’s site. With how much weight having the targeted keyword in your domain name is currently worth. You might also like inurl:keyphrase , which will display all domains which have your targeted keyphrase in them.  Aaron Wall over at SEOBook.com has a couple great tools for keyword competition analysis — one being SEO for Firefox, the other being his Keyword Suggestion Tool. They’re both free, so be sure to check them out. There are quite a few keyword research tools out there — do a google search on “keyword tools” to find something that fits what you’re looking for.

This being a blog about domain names and domain development, I probably shouldn’t have to say this, however if you’re new to domaining or developing domains, please remember that one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to rank well in the SERPs is to start your website with a good domain name. If you’re building a website for your company, that may unfortunately not be possible, however if you’re planning on starting a new company or if you just want a website or personal blog, purchase a good domain name before doing anything else. There’s not much in the way of good names left available for registration — whatever you do, don’t buy a cute brandable domain if you care about ranking well for a competitive term — you’ll be setting yourself up for an SEO nightmare and with many of the good SEOs charging $200+ an hour, you’re better off spending the money now on a good aftermarket domain than regretting not having purchased one by the time it’s too late to turn back. Stick to .com, preferably one containing at least one of the keywords you wanted to optimize your site for. If you do choose to go with an extension other than .com, make sure you try to purchase the .com if that’s at all possible — research suggests you’ll be giving the .com domain owner about 10% of your website’s traffic for free otherwise.

This article really only scratches the surface of good blog and website SEO, however I hope it served as a good introduction.

I’ve done a lot of reading on the long blog posts versus short blog posts issue over the past few years to better understand what would be the best option when developing my domains.. I thought it was one of the easiest things to change if I was doing it wrong — It’s not very hard to split a 2000 word post into a Part 1 and Part 2. Something that you’d think would have a relatively simple answer in turn ends up with quite a complicated one, with many well respected sources disagreeing with others.

One school of thought says you should write a blog post to be as long as it needs to be to get your point across. Considering that pagerank is quite important when it comes to SERPs rankings and the importance of getting quality incoming links in building that pagerank, it makes sense to suggest you should write the best possible article you can and if it ends up being short or long, so be it — however, is that the answer you get when someone says your posts should be as long as it needs to be. If I feel like slacking off tomorrow, can I use the cop out that my blog post is as long as it needs to be? The remainder of this post will go on to explain why what one person thinks the optimal length of a post should be won’t always match up with what others believe the optimal length of a post should be.

Short Blog Posts

A more recent school of thought places emphasis on the power of social media. Research on the behavior of users on websites such as Digg and StumbleUpon suggests that people don’t read the entire article before deciding whether it’s worthy of being dug or stumbled — matter of fact, users on social media sites often read only the title of the article before deciding what constitutes a good article — that’s one vote for why having a good title is important, in addition to it’s strong SEO weight. Knowing the fact that title tags are perhaps the most important SEO element, would one not be better off having more short blog posts (leading to more title tags)? Short blog posts also result in increased post frequency — frequent additions of new content are viewed positively by Google. The downside of short blog  posts is that there needs to be real content on the page to encourage people to link to the article — especially when it comes to authority websites. While the pagerank algorithm isn’t known, many SEO experts believe that each pagerank is approximately log scale 5.5. This means that getting a link from my blog (PR4) is worth around 166 times the link juice that a link from a PR1 website is worth and similarly, getting a link from my site is worth around 1/166th of what a link from a PR7 website would be worth (all other things held equal). Would you believe a link from a PR10 website is worth over 4.5 million PR1 links? It certainly won’t be easy (more like impossible) to get a PR10 website to dofollow link to you, however just to put things in perspective — a single PR10 link would automatically make your website a PR8. No wonder why people buy links!

Long Blog Posts

Long blog  posts are much more likely to be linked to — there’s a lot more content and hence, a better chance that someone will find something on your page interesting enough that they want to share it with other people. Because the blog post is so much longer, it’s also likely to have many keyphrases in it which will get you long tail searches. Using this blog as an example, blog posts tend to be quite long in contrast to other blogs — probably averaging 1500 words, whereas most blogs are probably somewhere around 300 words per blog post. Would you believe 65% of this blog’s search engine traffic this month (359/549 search engine referred visitors) was from keyphrases which only found my blog between 1 and 3 times? Out of those 549 search engine referred visitors, a whopping 315 different keyphrases were used to find this blog. One downside of long blog posts is that they take much longer to write and are hence difficult to consistently write on a daily basis. Long blog posts are unlikely to be produced in the same number as short blog posts and hence, result in less title tags and less chances for social media to work it’s magic. On most websites, visitors stay for under 2 minutes before going on to another website or doing something else — with blog posts as long as the ones I tend to write, it’s unlikely that someone could even finish reading the blog post in the average length of time visitors tend to stay, so writing long blog posts could result in visitors only hearing part of your message (you can of course use h1/h2 tags not only for the SEO benefits but also to guide users along their way to content they may be interested in).

Who are your blog’s visitors?

Another thing you may want to consider is who reads your blog. If I use the domain name industry as an example, there are already some fine blogs out there such as Domain Name Wire which sum up the day’s news and generally long before I would get around to doing it. Am I providing any value to my visitors by writing short blog posts that are already available elsewhere? In contrast, if I take that news article and expand on it with my thoughts and the thoughts of other people I’ve asked to share their opinion and I further complement that with research I’ve done or paid for, I can now provide value which wasn’t found elsewhere. My personal opinion on the matter is that blog posts sharing news should be short whereas posts sharing information should be longer. There’s only so much information about the latest UDRP that your average visitor is going to want to read if the UDRP doesn’t affect them or if your average visitor doesn’t even know what a UDRP is, whereas if you write an informative post on say “How to avoid UDRPs”, many domain name investors will probably want to know everything they can do to mitigate their risk. Do your readers want you to get straight to the point or do they want to know every last detail?

Link Juice and SERPs

Think about your blog’s pagerank and how having more posts is going to divide that pagerank up into each page being worth less than had you had fewer posts.  If I put a sitemap up (something I really need to get done) and it links to each my 180 posts, how much link juice would be flowing to each of those blog posts? If I had 90 blog posts instead of 180, each post would receive much more and if I had 360 posts, each would receive much less. Who am I competing against in the SERPs for search engine traffic on these blog posts? If I already hold the #1 spot for a particular keyphrase I had optimized my blog for, can I perhaps not afford to forego a bit of link juice assuming I will still be able to retain the #1 ranking)? Would I be better off with 1000 PR2 blog posts or 20 PR4 blog posts? Would the answer to that not depend on which keyphrases I’m targeting, where I currently rank in the SERPs, keyword competition on my targeted keyphrases, and expected search engine traffic to be received from ranking high in the SERPs for those targeted keyphrases? I wasn’t even aware of this myself but what I was reading today on SEO blogs is that Google has apparently changed the way nofollow is handled, so you can’t engage in pagerank sculpting by placing nofollow on pages you don’t want using your pagerank — now, any link be it dofollow or nofollow will use you pagerank, just that a nofollow link will give you (or the person you’re linking to) nothing in return. All of the sudden, it seems pretty stupid to be using nofollow (I better change that!).

Microblogging and Linkblogging: How Short is a Short Post?

Isn’t it incredible how something so simple as whether your blog posts should be short or long can turn into such a complicated question with so many angles to consider? And now just recently, we have to consider not only short and long blog posts but also microblogging — just another thing to throw in there to further complicate things. To those who’ve been living under a rock recently, microblogging and linkblogging take short blog posts to a whole new level — why bother writing a blog post at all and not just give the title and maybe one or two sentences? I doubt I would ever read a blog myself that consisted purely of 1-2 sentence posts, however they can be mixed up with longer posts here and there when there isn’t much to say about an issue. A 2 sentence rant on your hate of domain appraisals subsequently followed by you asking your readers what they think about the matter could very well prove interesting, as might a one sentence post such as “Click here to see a good discussion on the uselessness of domain appraisals” — there might not be much content to the post but there may be plenty of interesting content left by readers about their opinions on the matter. I know Jamie over at DotWeekly has started incorporating microblogging into his domain blogging regime. Microblogging over a platform such as Twitter will allow you to connect with many people who might never have otherwise found your blog through the traditional channels such as search engines or RSS readers. There a few websites out there that will take your blog post and condense it to fit it on microblogging platforms such as Twitter so that you can write a normal size blog post on your blog while still getting the main message or a good idea of what your blog post is about across to microblogging communities.

Post Length and Blog Readership

Shorter blog posts will probably lead to more readers but what do you want more blog readers for? If you want more readers so you can show potential advertisers that you have more readers to justify charging them a higher rate, that certainly seems to make sense. If you want to try and sell visitors an informational product (eg. ebook), you’re probably better off writing longer blog posts so that readers can see that you write quality material and that your informational product will likely be worth the price for them. One needs to consider conversions. How much is a visitor worth if he buys your product? If you’re trying to sell your readers a product, then you don’t care about the number of visitors but rather the number of conversions. How many blog readers can you convert into product buyers?

Perhaps you’re like me and haven’t yet gotten around to properly monetizing your blog — you’re just not sure what you want to do with it yet. Would you not prefer to have more loyal blog readers than the one-off blog reader who found what he was looking for and will never come back? This once again goes back to the question of what makes a first time blog reader a regular blog reader. If you have more blog posts, they may find more that interests them, however if you have longer, informative blog posts, your posts probably deliver more value which they haven’t found elsewhere. If I take this post as an example — there are plenty of blogs which have covered the short post versus long post blog debate over the years, however how many of them have written a 2800 word article about it? Most of them have a couple hundred words with more conjecture than fact. Most offer an incomplete, not elaborated upon answer along the lines of “Write your blog posts as long as it takes to deliver your message”. That’s great, but of what help is it to you in determining what’s best for your blog and your blog’s visitors? You probably googled up the short post versus long post issue because you weren’t sure of what message your blog should deliver. I could have written this exact same post and delivered the exact same message in half as many words by not elaborating on any of the main points. Would that have been better? For some, I’m sure it would have been. Others, once again, are looking for something more informative that they can’t find elsewhere. With so many bloggers already having covered the short post versus long post issue, of what value am I providing if I’m just one of the hundred others all providing an incomplete answer?

Blog Post Content

One thing I need to work on myself is making posts more scannable — If I provide an H1 tag every 500 words or so, it makes the post easier for visitors with little available time to scan through and decide whether the entire post is worth reading, not reading, or worth reading those 500 words between one H1 tag and the next one. The same goes for bolding or changing the colors on key points to make my longer posts more reader friendly. With the ever increasing popularity of microblogging and the overwhelming number of new blogs being created each day, I expect we’ll see short posts eventually fall out of favor, with people preferring either microblog posts or long posts. There’s only so much you can cover in a 300 word post and it usually doesn’t cover much more than you could have gotten from just reading the title and perhaps a 2-3 sentence summary.  I think I’ve summed up most of the main points to consider when determining what length your blog posts should be.  While suggesting that one’s blog posts should be as long as they need to be to get one’s point across is a little too simple, it doesn’t make sense to intentionally increase your word count for a blog post subject that can be explained in far fewer words.

As I often say on this blog, time is money. Are you providing your readers with value for their time? If not, cut your post’s length down to the point where you are. If you can provide 3000 words of value to your readers, then there’s nothing wrong with writing a 3000 word post. Place yourself in your reader’s shoes — would you read your own blog post (and be honest with yourself here)? Studies on post length suggest that shorter posts tend to contain more value per word — but is your reader a utilitarian obsessed with maximizing utility or someone who doesn’t necessarily want the most value on a per word basis but the most value overall? I could have certainly provided more value on a per word basis with this article had I made it 300 words instead of 2600, however would a reader then have to google the issue to find out what my blog post left out? To me, that’s unacceptable. If I cover an issue, I want to cover as many angles as I’m aware of — that doesn’t mean I’ll always cover every angle because I’m often not aware of every angle, but at the very least, I strive to cover what I know whenever I can and if I don’t know enough that I would be satisfied with the answers provided upon reading my own blog post, I’ll consult with someone who can clue me in to the rest or I’ll google the post topic myself to see what other spins I can put on the article and whether there were any main points I missed out on covering.

If you want to appeal to as many visitors as possible, there’s nothing wrong with writing posts of different lengths. Some of my posts are extremely long, whereas sometimes they’re only 500 words or so. Similarly, for a blog that routinely puts out 500 word posts, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional microblog post or 200 word post. Like I talked about in yesterday’s post, there’s a lot in common between domaining and domain development. If you start applying concepts you’ve learnt in domaining to domain development, I think you’ll see quickly grow. Everything really does come down to targeted traffic. Even if you’re selling advertising on a CPM basis, you’re not going to find your advertisers staying around long if your traffic is so untargeted it’s not converting into sales for them.

You’ll find links to the current and previous LLLL.com price guides here.

June 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide

April 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide

Short Domain Name Guide

Older LLLL.com Price Guides

This LLLL.com Price Guide considers all reported LLLL.com auction sales between April 01, 2009 and June 04, 2009. Domain name marketplaces having a presence include Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy Auctions, eBay, NameJet, and SnapNames. Many short domain investors who buy domains on eBay have noticed that on the low end, LLLL.com prices are down — they’re down a bit elsewhere as well, however it’s most obvious on eBay, where LLLL.coms have sold for as little as $0.55 and others have gone unsold with starting bids of $0.99 (including some of my own LLLL.coms put on eBay). I was quite surprised by the domain which went for $0.55 — QYGU.com.. It’s quite pronounceable and even in this depressed market, it’s an excellent short domain investment at that price. The difficulty when looking at the LLLL.com market, just like the LLL.com market and other short domain markets, is that it’s often difficult to separate outlier sales from those which aren’t. In the case of LLL.coms for example, a bad LLL.com selling for $7000-$8000 today is unlikely to have sold to a domainer unless there is something beyond being a 3 letter .com domain going for it, however go back one year and short domain investors would have been prepared to spend $7000-$8000 on such a domain. With LLLL.coms, it’s more of a different story.. With the 2000+ reported LLLL.com sales (and no doubt countless unreported LLLL.com sales), it’s often difficult to determine whether LLLL.com sales are outliers or representative of the minimum wholesale. If we take QYGU.com as an example, any short domain investor worth their salt knows that isn’t a $0.55 domain. On the other hand, if an LLLL.com with 4 bad letters sold for $0.55, we might have difficulty deciding whether this is an outlier sale or representative of a falling minimum wholesale on bad LLLL.coms. My conclusion regarding the low end LLLL.com market is that it’s a bit of both — prices have certainly fallen, however they appear to have fallen far more than they actually have if you place too much weight on eBay LLLL.com sales.

Short Domain Prices

Would you believe there hasn’t been any reported LLLL.com sales (and that includes non-auction LLLL.com sales) for under $4.00 since February on any venue other than eBay? That doesn’t of course mean they haven’t happened, however there is no documentation of them happening. Despite not having any reported LLLL.com sales under $4.00 since February, I know that saying the minimum wholesale on the worst of the bad LLLL.coms is $4.00 would be overly optimistic — indeed, one must not only look at what short domains have sold for but also at whether short domains are selling at that price. That’s something which many short domain investors in the LLL.com market have struggled with in past months as well — It’s one thing to have reported sales data on LLL.coms, LLLL.coms, LLLLL.coms which suggests a certain percentile, an average, or a median LLL.com, LLLL.com, LLLLL.com sells for a certain price, however it’s quite another to say with certainty that an LLL.com, LLLL.com, LLLLL.com will sell for that price. When I speak of the minimum wholesale, be it in any of those short domain markets, I’m not referring to the lowest price a short domain has sold for — rather, I’m referring to the most expensive price a bad short domain could have while being able to sell within a limited period of time. Take a bad LLLL.com as an example — you might be able to get $10 for it, however if it takes you 3 months to get $10 for it, then it’s liquid value is not $10. I’m of the opinion that if you can’t get the short domain sold within 72 hours, it’s because you’ve overvalued the liquid value of your short domain — this might not necessarily be the case if you’re like me and have thousands of LLLL.coms available for sale, however if you have just a handful of LLLL.coms for sale and you can’t get them sold, it’s probably because you priced them too high. The liquid value of the worst LLLL.com is what I consider the minimum wholesale and the liquid value of the weakest LLLL.com having a certain letter quality or pattern in turn represents the minimum wholesale of that LLLL.com segment.

Short Domain Renewals

Another very important factor to consider when dealing with LLLL.coms and other short domains is what I like to refer to as the renewal premium. By the very definition of minimum wholesale I set out above, we can think of a minimum wholesale LLLL.com as an LLLL.com which receives no traffic, produces no revenue, has no potential end users in sight, and which short domain investors can’t make acronyms out of for the life of them. I’ll refrain from giving an example, as I always tend to pick domains someone owns and then I get nasty emails asking me why I just had to pick on their domain. Anyway, I think you get the point — a minimum wholesale domain should be a short domain which is as bad as a short domain can get per it’s character combination/pattern.  Even when we talk about the worst of the worst domains, a short domain investor finds that (in the LLLL.com and other short domain markets where domains sell for relatively low prices) knowing how good or bad a domain is isn’t enough to accurately price the domain. Indeed, one of the key factors impacting LLLL.com valuations at this time is the annual upkeep (renewal fee) associated with keeping these cheap short domains. It’s not very hard to see that so long as the worst LLLL.com has some value, then a comparable quality LLLL.com with more time remaining until it needs to be renewed is in effect a better domain.

This is something many short domain investors bring up and I think many have trouble understanding. Look at it like this — if it’s going to cost you $8.00 to renew the domain, then every day that the domain is closer to needing to be renewed is a day closer to the day which will cost you $8.00 (should you choose to renew the domain of course). If you take that $8.00 annual domain renewal fee and split it down into days, each day is worth about 2.2 cents, meaning if a domain expiring tomorrow is worth X, a similar domain expiring in 30 days should be worth X +30($0.022) = X + $0.66. If the domain was initially worth say, $1, this second domain should be worth around $1.66. Now most people in the domain world are unlikely to price their domain with such an odd number — more than likely the price would be either $2 or $1.50. If both domains cost $1 (eg. both domains cost the same amount), you’re of course better off going with the second domain. You might still be better off going with the second domain even if it comes across as being more expensive by doing this analysis — there is of course an opportunity cost that needs to be factored in to spending money to renew domains – money that could otherwise have been invested into other domains. When investing in cheap short domains, such as bad LLLL.coms, it’s important to check what the domain’s renewal fees will be, in addition to checking when the domain’s expiration date is and whether there is still enough time to get the domain transferred to a cheaper registrar (in the event it’s currently at an expensive one).

Overall LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $2.00*

10th percentile: $7.20

25th percentile: $11.00

Median: $20.00

75th percentile:  $45.00

90th percentile: $210.00

*There have been 9 reported sales under $2.00 out of over 2500 LLLL.com sales since April 1st –  I have another 10 or so of my own unreported sales under $2.00 as well. The likelihood of a random LLLL.com selling for at least $2 is around 99 times out of 100 which seems like a fair number to use as a minimum wholesale. Nine out of ten randomly chosen LLLL.coms would sell for at least $7.20 and one in two would sell for $20.00. We see once again in this LLLL.com price guide what I talked about recently involving a widening gap between minimum wholesale LLLL.coms and higher quality LLLL.coms.

Triple Premium LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $4.00

10th percentile: $9.00

25th percentile: $15.39

Median: $25.00

75th percentile: $42.00

90th percentile: $104.60

Quad Premium LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $110.00

10th percentile: $122.00

25th percentile: $143

Median: $210

75th percentile: $460

I wanted to release an LLLL.com letter guide to better help with letter-based pricing, however Excel unfortunately messed it up after I had put a good 10 hours into it, so I guess that’ll have to wait until some other time. For the most part, it’s the same as always – Q/X/Z are the weakest letters and F/G/H are your weakest premium letters. I don’t want to get into the whole Chinese end user debate on here — I’ve sold more LLLL.coms to Chinese domainers this past month than to Americans and Europeans combined, so yeah, there are certainly some buyers out there, however I’m going to continue with the bad letter terminology granted these letters still report lower selling prices on average, despite their premium status elsewhere.   Semi-premiums have always followed a pattern along the lines of: Y < J < K < V < U < W . You’re usually looking at $20-$40 on a triple premium + U and $30-$50 on a triple premium + W. Triple premiums + K are usually around $15-$30 and triple premiums + J around $10-$20. When percentiles are given, imagine a triple premium + Q as “on average” being the triple premium which will report a price nearest the minimum wholesale, whereas a triple premium + U/W will most likely sell above the median (50th percentile) — meaning it is “on average” better than the average triple premium LLLL.com.

This doesn’t of course always hold true and to a certain extent, it’s why I prefer to give broad percentiles rather than elaborating too much on which letters are better than others because there are no guarantees an LLLL.com with a “W” is better than an LLLL.com with a “Q” and if you read this guide assuming that, you may end up passing up some good deals or conversely, overpaying for what you thought was a domain better than it actually is. I often get asked to appraise people’s LLLL.coms (please don’t ask — I don’t have time!) and what I usually tell them to do is simple — start a thread on a popular domain forum in their “Make Offer” section and see what kind of offers you get. Usually the offers you get will be reasonably close to the reseller value of the domain — maybe a bit higher, maybe a bit lower. If you can then get that person to submit their top offer on Sedo, you should be able to get top dollar for your domain — I’m of the opinion that auctions generally do bring about a good indicator of the true reseller value of a domain. Sure, there are a few end user sales here and there that we’d need to weed out and there is the occasional domain which sells for less than it probably would have had it been auctioned again, however auctions are about as good as it gets for consistently achieving respectable sale prices. I would’ve liked to have reported on rare LLLL.coms in this LLLL.com Price Guide, however there were so few sales, there’s really no way to conclude what’s happened in the market since I last reported on it (see the April 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide). I covered pronounceables back in the April 17th guide as well — I haven’t seen much to suggest anything has changed sufficiently to warrant rewriting what I wrote there. Below are sales which have been compiled by Namepros members and LLLL Sales.com.

Please remember that whenever I give minimum wholesales or suggest a domain will sell within a certain range, I mean that it will sell for at least that as a minimum. Your LLLL.coms will most likely sell for more, especially if they’re a long ways from needing to be renewed. As mentioned earlier, an LLLL.com that would be worth $2 that is expiring tomorrow would be worth around $10 if it had a full year of renewal on it. Minimum wholesales mentioned in this guide assume the domain is near expiry.

End of Guide.

Released: June 06, 2009

Hello my name is Joshua Hunt-Smith, I am an expert level eBay seller (raredn) who possesses extensive knowledge on selling domain names on eBay.com. This post should help you optimize your eBay.com short domain name auctions and at the same time, also help you become a better eBay seller in general.

My home page is yeswebdesign.com because I have a passion for more than just domain names.

Ok, lets dive in.

Information Suitability:

For both new eBay sellers and Established eBay sellers wanting to optimize their eBay auctions to attract more bidders.

Why is my focus on the eBay.com website in particular?

Any country that’s able to make a domain name listing on the eBay.com site should list domain names there instead of your home country eBay website, as eBay.com is searched by more people looking for domain names (there may some exceptions, such as if you are selling a .co.uk domain or .ca domain name, which may sell better on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ca. Honestly though, any eBay site is probably not the best place to sell country code domain names). Note: If you’re selling other goods that are not domain names, this is a different story and listing auctions at your home country’s eBay website is often a good way to sell physical goods. If the physical goods you are selling are much cheaper in your country than in another country (or countries), you can target those countries for potential sales as well.

These first 4 steps below are for people have not sold on eBay before, feel free to skip reading the first 4 steps if you want:

• The main method for accepting payment on eBay is Paypal (You can visit Paypal.com to sign up for an account. You will find a sign up link both at the very top of the Paypal website and below the Paypal user login submit button), although some sellers see this as a concern because of potential for chargebacks, where a customer takes back the money they have put into your Paypal account through another Paypal account. Chargebacks are unlikely to be of concern from eBay buyers with reputable feedback ratings (a feedback rating is the number shown to the right of every eBay username, you can click on the number to see what other sellers or buyers have said about them).

• The first thing you need is an eBay account — you can sign up at the eBay website that relates to your home country (Simply typing the two words Register eBay into Google’s search bar should bring up the eBay sign up page for your country as the first search result displayed by Google).

• If you already have an eBay account, you may want to start selling. To do so, click Sell on the top of the eBay page menu from within your eBay account. If this is your first time selling on eBay, you will be prompted to enter a credit card or debit card into your eBay account (eBay also says in ’some cases’ they will require your checking account information). Note: if you really don’t want to put a credit or debit card on file, search google for the words eBay id verify and sign up for that – do note that it has a small fee.

• Once you have registered for an eBay seller account and are ready to sell a domain name, click on the Sell tab at top right hand corner of your eBay account. Then click on Start selling, and now enter the words domain name (and I would suggest entering your extension after the words domain name, such as .org) into the input box you are given. Ebay will suggest the computers and networking category, then tick the box shown below where it says computers and networking and tick the box that matches your domain name extension (.com or whatever). Now click continue down the bottom of the page. Read the rest of this blog post to see what to do from here.

Note on seller fees: eBay says it won’t charge your credit card for seller fees unless you accept for it to be used for paying seller fees. That said, I prefer to use Paypal to pay my seller fees. Doing it this way, the eBay and Paypal expenses are all paid for by the auction revenue alone, so long as you have enough funds in your Paypal account. If you do not, Paypal will withdraw money out of your bank balance that you have connected with your Paypal account.

Making an optimized eBay listing:

Put all your main keywords in your eBay title: Why, you ask? Both subtitles and the auction body text don’t have the advantage in eBay search results like the title of your auction does. The keywords you were thinking about putting in your subtitle and also the eBay auction body text only show when somebody ticks the ‘Include title and description’ check box that is sometimes shown as a tickable option under the main eBay search input bar.

So what keywords should you be putting in a short domain name auction? For an llll.com you should definitely be putting llll.com in your title (put it in capital letters, as LLLL.com will stand out more while still using the small amount of characters) You should also put the letters LLLL followed without .com somewhere in the auction title, in what order it doesn’t matter to eBay’s search algorithms. If you have both LLLL.com and LLLL (remember, I said both), you’ll get in eBay’s search results for people typing in and searching for LLLL.com, LLLL .com (notice the space between LLLL .com you need to account for people searching like that) and also plain LLLL.

The title is where it’s at:

What else could we put in the search title? How about the word ’short’ and the words ‘domain name’ — this will get people searching for Short Domain Name, as well as people searching for llll.com. Hey, what about the the number ‘4‘ and the word ‘letter‘ ? Yes, people will search eBay for the term ‘4 letter domain name’, so make sure you put ‘4 Letter’ into your LLLL.com eBay auction title (you still have room, even if you entered all the search words I mentioned above into your LLLL.com auction title. Also, always remember to put  ‘domain name’ in the title). If your domain name is a genuine CVCV (Consonant Vowel Consonant Vowel), AABB or VCVC style letter combination, please put that in the title too – yes, you still have room. If your domain name is not a CVCV, do not put it in your auction title, as all you’ll do is make domainers angry and quite a few people will not want to bid on your auction because of the misleading title.

What about LLL.coms and other domain names like keyword domain names and also country code domain names? As mentioned previously, put all keywords in your auction title. For a keyword domain name like say, EcologicalCars.com (I don’t own it), I could make the following eBay auction title: “EcologicalCars.com 2 Word Eco Green Car Domain Name“. This way, I have related the search terms eco and green as being related search keywords in the title, along with domain name. As for ‘2 word’, it probably isn’t the most searched term — if you can think of something better, by all means use that.

Gallery Image:

Always put a gallery image in your eBay auction, it takes up far more room in search results than a listing with no gallery image, making your auction far more noticeable to potential buyers. Making something colorful and fancy looking can draw attention but be careful what color and text styles you use, as eBay’s gallery pictures get compressed to a very low resolution, blurring what you thought might look good into a mess. Play around with gallery images with your domain name written on them until you find something that looks good once inserted in an eBay auction. Also if possible, don’t use the same gallery picture for each listing, variation makes the listings look less boring, but keep in mind varying gallery pictures is more time consuming, you weigh your options and decide whether it is worth your time. On the flipside, using the same gallery image lets everyone know you are the same seller, so this could have some benefit if you have made a good selling reputation for yourself.

The body of your eBay listing:

Presentation: Make your eBay auction look neat. I personally like to center my eBay auctions (you can use the styling options in your eBay auction). I like to say what the domain name is — for instance, something like ‘Quad Premium 4 Letter LLLL.com Domain Name’ if that is what it is, then I like to make the domain name itself written in large bold and clear writing. I like to put the domain name renewal date under the domain name, including what registrar the domain name is registered at. Note that I said renewal date (Not expiry date) – it lets new domain investors know that a domain name is renewable and that it does not just expire and disappear forever. Next, I mention that moving the domain name from registrar (insert yours) to the same registrar, will be free. Mentioning that there are no hidden fees associated with your domain name auction is a good idea too. I also mention if the buyer wants to initiate a transfer to a different registrar to please only do it if they understand the process involved (believe me, something along those lines is the best way to say it). There are people who think you can just push a domain name from one domain registrar to another domain registrar for free. Put spacing between lines in your auction, as it looks better on the eyes. Also, put a link cross promoting your other eBay auctions in your auction if you have more than that one auction.

If you have Dreamweaver or an alternative visual code editor, you can make some pretty fancy looking eBay auctions and then paste in the HTML into your eBay listing, although I don’t think this really is necessary for an eBay auction. A neat layout combined with basic presentation will get the job done in most cases.

If your domain name is available to people worldwide, write in the auction details, something like: International bidders welcome, as otherwise this can be unclear in your eBay auction.

Finish off the listing page:

After you have entered the domain name information into the body of your auction under where it says something like: Describe the item you are selling, scroll further down the page and enter your starting page. I most often start my auctions at $0.99 but if you want a certain price, start your auction at the minumum you would be willing to accept and take into account that eBay and Paypal (if you are using Paypal), are going to add seller fees on top of that. Next, set the duration of your auction. I like my auctions to go for 7 days and end late Thursday night USA time, as I have a feeling that there are more bidders then, but things could change.

Now scroll down the page a bit further and you will be asked about payment options you will accept. On eBay.com, the options at the time of writing were:

• Paypal
• Credit Card
• Money Bookers
• Paymate
• Propay

You can choose more than one option if you wish. If you are going to use Paypal there is an input box where you can enter your Paypal registered email address for accepting of payments

• Under payment, you will find shipping options
• First up US shipping
• Choose flat rate shipping under the select box
• From the services select box choose other
• In the cost input box dollar amount, put in 0.00 and make sure to tick the free shipping check box show to the right
• Now you have set up free shipping for the USA

If you are going to offer your domain name to potential customers world wide, you will find international shipping a bit further, under US shipping.

• Choose the flat rate shipping option
• Then choose world wide under the ship to select box (If you want to sell your domain names to only certain countries, choose custom location and tick the countries you want your auctions available too)
• Now under the services select box, choose ‘Other Int’l Shipping
• In the cost input box you must put 0.00 as in $0.00 dollars

Now if you have your shipping as shown above, you will have the words free shipping show up in front of your auctions in eBay search results that contain your particular domain name (or domain names).

Any other sections under shipping, I think people should be able to fill out and work out on their own without many issues. Now you should end up at the bottom of the page — click the continue button.

On the next page you can choose things such as making your title bold and featuring your listing.

If it is a domain up season, I will choose to have a better domain name that I am selling ticked under featured in search results. I would also then make the writing bold and choose a border out of the selections.

If it is not a domain up season, I will not choose any of the extras on that page – I will just click the list my auction button and my auction will immediately become live. If you want to set an automatic start time for the auction, you can choose that option on the previous page of your listing for a small fee. Be sure you understand the time zones and eBay time in relation to what you are doing there if choosing automatic listing time.

After the auction:

After the auction if I do not already have the customer’s details from them winning a previous auction of mine, I will ask the customer for their account number and email from the registrar you are moving the domain to. I will then add this to a list of customer details in a notepad on my computer (Do not ask customers for any passwords, you never need a password to move a domain name to someone else). When the customer pays, I search the notepad for the customers username and registrar details, move the domain name to them and leave them positive feedback.

Safe trading and use of eBay

eBay communication safety:

Number one rule of eBay communication: Always use eBay messages whenever possible for communicating with anyone on eBay. This way you can avoid scam emails that pretend to be eBay pages (they often look the same but are actually there to steal your eBay details that you enter in what usually is a fake login page). So that said, never answer an email that asks for personal information of any kind, most especially passwords and credit card details. If you have to login for something to do with eBay, you can do it by logging into your eBay account and checking if eBay has left you a message. Never enter a password to a supposed eBay page from a link in an email!

Fake second chance offers — second chance offer emails for popular items on eBay was once a popular eBay scam. Still may be but I have not seen any emails like that for a long time now.

About eBay accounts that have been hijacked:

Hijacked eBay accounts: Weak eBay login passwords and email phishing scams that ask for you to enter your eBay password are some of the methods used by people to hijack and enter someone else’s eBay account, along with the collection of data from spyware compromised machines.

What do people do with a hijacked eBay account?

• List extremely popular selling items on the hijacked eBay account for very cheap prices compared to retail. The hijacker would put an email address specifically for you to contact them to buy more of the item outside of eBay — the email address would be shown somewhere that could be easily seen in the auction details, usually saying something like: contact me at (their email address) to buy a brand new Cannon EOS 1D mark iii SLR camera for $600, or something else like that. This may be their current method but I have not come across these scams in quite some time. This could also be because I have not been searching for popular goods on eBay in awhile though.
• Could someone use a hijacked account to bid on a domain name? This is possible. There exists also the possibility of eBay accounts being created with stolen credit cards. But how does this relate to eBay chargebacks in Paypal back to the buyer once they have acquired your domain name? I’m not an expert on Paypal chargebacks but I do know they were happening frequently enough during the time of high llll.com sales prices in early 08 to cause quite an upset amongst domainers.

So you may think, “Should I use something like Moneybookers or an Escrow service to accept payment instead of Paypal?” You can if you wish but you will get very few bidders unfortunately — that is the reality of the present situation. Especially if you are starting an auction at $0.99 (side note: Did you know it costs a lot more to list an auction from $1 and a lot less if you start it at $0.99? Well that’s true, same goes for if you start an auction at 24.99 — listing fees costs almost half as much as starting at $25, and once again, the same goes for $49.99 and $50 ). Even if you start an auction for a much higher price and the domain name is worth it, using anything other than Paypal is off-putting. Of course with the value of some domain names, you would be silly not to offer the domain name with Escrow as the only payment option. If your domain name is valued up to a few hundred dollars at most, I would still go with Paypal personally. You can always say something like “Please only bid if you have reputable feedback reputation” if you want to be extra cautious.

Note: If you can’t find something you want to do in your eBay account, try the sitemap at the bottom of every eBay page.

Thank you

Joshua Hunt-Smith

I know a lot of domainers who tread very close to the cybersquatter line — they might be legally safe, however they continue to encourage the “All domainers are cybersquatters” mentality. With all the talk about the URS and how this could destroy domainers, I’m flabbergasted to see domainers literally cheering on .cm — many of whom are of course only interested because it will provide them with the best opportunity in a decade to cybersquat . First thought that comes to mind — Are you that stupid? Pardon my language but other words just don’t express my shock. Domainers like to complain about stuff like the UDRP but why do we have a UDRP in the first place? Because a whole lot of stupid domainers thought it’d be a brilliant idea to register McDonalds.com and hold them hostage for $10,000 and a Happy Meal.

Do you think ICANN and big corporations aren’t going to closely monitor registrations in the .cm extension? Will this Cameroonian extension not provide the evidence they need to show that domainers really are cybersquatters and that increased protection such as the URS need to be implemented? How much unnecessary stress and hardship has the UDRP and ACPA caused many domainers? How many panelists have become biased towards corporations because of how much blatant cybersquatting they’ve seen?

Squat all the domains you want but just know that some people like me have had it with trademark infringing scum and I’m going to personally do companies like McDonald’s a favor and alert them to these scumbags infringing on their mark(s). Why? Because I make my money honestly and I’m sick of being associated with these pathetic individuals who have no creative ideas of their own and hence decide to profit off those of others.

Despite being a short domain investor, I’ve never completely understood the attraction many domainers have to 1 letter domains in exotic ccTLDs. I can think of a few logical uses, such as URL shortening or perhaps a web hosting company offering hosting on subdomains of their main domain, but why would someone pay thousands for a short domain in some exotic ccTLD that even most domainers haven’t heard of? Who remembers what the .la registry did not so long ago to owners of their short domains? That’s one of the main reasons I don’t like these registries — there is no accountability. If VeriSign told owners of 2 letter .coms or of generics that they were taking their domains away (eg. that they wouldn’t be allowed to renew them), all hell would break loose, and rightfully so. But with a ccTLD like .la, they can pretty much do as they please — I sure as heck wouldn’t be placing my domain dollars anywhere near there. I’m a big fan of ccTLDs — real ccTLDs like .ca, .co.uk, .de — not garbage like .ws, .la, .etc.

Besides the lack of accountability, another shocker are the very steep renewal fees these domains have — it’s not uncommon for the renewal fee to be $500, $1000, or even more per year for one letter domains. At $1000 per year, you’ve spent $10,000 on this one letter domain, plus whatever you paid to acquire it in the first place after 10 years. You can get a pretty good domain for $10,000… If you have your mind set on a short domain, why not go with a good LLL.com or if you want something shorter still, why not go for a 2 letter domain in a popular ccTLD such as the ones I mentioned above (provided you meet the ccTLD ownership requirements of course)? I just don’t see the rationale behind these 1 letter domains..

The reason a 4 letter .com sells for less than a 3 letter .com is twofold. One is of course the fact that there are 26 times more LLLL.coms, however the much bigger reason isn’t the amount available (afterall, even 456,976 domains isn’t that large of a number when you think of how many businesses are out there) but rather the fact that there are far more businesses with 3 letter acronyms than 4 letter acronyms. The same can be said about 2 letter domains — type in 2 random letters and chances are a few potential end users jump right out. There are practically no limits on how a good LL.com can be branded…

So let’s move on to one letter domains now… What do one letter domains have going for them?

You can’t buy 1 letter domains in any decent TLD/ccTLD — the few one letter domains which are registered are owned by people who aren’t going to be selling anytime soon unless you’re prepared to fork over one heck of a lot of money. As for rarity, I’ll give one letter domains that.. But how the heck do you brand a one letter domain? There are a few ways I can think of, however nowhere near the amount of ways I can think of branding a good 2 letter domain. If you had a one letter domain in .com, then yes, I can see the value — as we shift more and more towards a wireless and mobile society, many companies such as Google (who owns G.cn) will no doubt want shorter domains. The thing is, we’re not talking about short domains in “end user” friendly extensions here, we’re talking about exotic ccTLDs which even the PhDs at Google have probably never heard of.

I ask — what is the value of a domain which end users don’t want and which is very difficult to brand? When you can get a 2 letter domain in many of these same extensions for $40 per year or so, does it really make sense to spend all that extra money for a one letter domain? I certainly don’t think so.