Web domains and optimization
Whether you are buying a new domain to develop and to sell, or whether you want to keep it to make money from, you should think about the use of search engine optimization in the development process.
Whether it is to make your site more valuable for a buyer (to whom you can point to good traffic or Pagerank), or for the sake of your income (for which you also need steady, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), optimization is vital unless you are simply going to promote by pay-per-click.
You may have heard some SEO myths presented as fact. It is now taken for granted among the top SEO commentators that key words in the domain itself have no influence on the rankings of site pages. The days are over where search engine algorithms could be misled by simple tricks like creating a domain called buy-keyword1–keyword2.com. Your internal page names, if they incorporate keywords, may have some benefit, though this too is doubtful.
So, when choosing your domain name, you shouldn't worry when you find all the top domains are already taken. The search engine results listings will show the domain name to those searching, but that is the only possible advantage of keywords in a domain name.
Another myth is that using pay-per-click on your new domain will get it noticed, get the spiders in, and give it a push up in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be completely untrue, and is the result of simple-minded hopeful thinking.
Get some links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive as a matter of course.
Show decent content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't think of original content, pay someone who can. The old ways of collecting web content – scraping, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat techniques either don't work or will get you banned.
Don't worry about keyword density, just create your pages on a natural, single subject. In fact, do not worry about the search engines at all. Your aim should be to give something great to your real audience – your human visitors.
Trying to validate your new site to W3C standard is a simple waste of your time. Google would have to exclude 99% of the internet from its results if it used this for ranking. Use the time saved to create new pages.
Don't pay to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling PR-based links. This may have worked once, but the search engine algorithms no longer give much weight to tricks like this. Just consider – a cash-rich company could buy its way to the top of the listings for every phrase it wanted, if paying for links actually worked: and it would eliminate the value of the search engines to their users. This is the very thing Google and the other engines want to prevent at all costs.
However, the search engine giants can make mistakes. Some sites, however great and original their content and however numerous their incoming links, just never get anywhere in the search results. Look for another new domain and try again.
About the Author: To read all about domains, how to buy them and how to make money from them, go here - registering domain names.
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Print Article | Download PDF | 80 views | Mar 17 2008
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