Tue 06 Jan 2009
The following section will try to outline ways in which domain
names are used on the web, and why we have outlined 'domain
names' as a way of making money.
Choosing The Right Name:
A great domain name for your website
doesn't necessarily mean it has to be your company name - for
example, if you use your own name for your business (e.g. John
Smith), and your business is 'building services in Suffolk',
normally in the local business directory (e.g. Yellow Pages)
you'd request your 'John Smith' advert to be listed under
'Building services'. Logical.
With search engines on the internet, this method of thinking
doesn't really work. If you were able to buy 'johnsmith.com'
as your domain name, you could spend your time and money on
designing your website and then submitting it to the search
engines. And then you wait for your site to be 'crawled' by
the search engines, and for your site to appear in search results.
Now, with popular engines like Google, your domain name can
help boost your site's ranking if the search term someone has
used can be found within your domain name as well as within
the content of your web pages. If a search for 'building services
in suffolk' was entered, the domain name 'johnsmith.com' would
not be matched to the search term by the search engine, so
you'd be relying solely on the content of your web pages (or
even a 'pay-per-click' scheme) to be matched to the search
term, and for your site to be ranked within the results accordingly.
However, if you had the domain name 'suffolkbuildingservices.com',
there's a greater chance the search engine will favour your
site to be more relevent to the search, resulting in a possible
higher listing.
If you take advice from the above, keeping your domain name
down to one or two words is advisable, mainly because for the
people that DO know your domain name will not want to be typing
a whole sentence into their address bar just to see your site!
Plus, if you use the domain name for emails, your email address
will be just as much of a problem!
Buying Domains To Sell / Auction:
The domain name market is big business. What might seem a useless
domain name to one person, to another it might be exacly
what they're looking for, and with a bit of luck they'll
pay what it takes to own it!
What makes a domain valuable? There
are several factors to take into consideration here: What
extension it has (.com, .co.uk, .org etc etc), how long the
name is, what history it has, what it says or means - and how
popular or topical it's meaning currently is. A good example
of a valuable name would be a well established extension (like
.com), the name would be very short (easy to remember / easy
to type), it would have a history (maybe the domain has or
had a website associated with it which attracted web traffic,
and maybe also is currently listed on search engines), and
is currently a topical word or phrase or combination of letters.
To check to see if a domain is available to register, you're
welcome to use our free
online service. If you'd like us to register a
domain for you, please contact us by phone or email.
Once you've registered a domain name you then need to know
what to do with it next. Please read on...
Appraisals:
By all means you could sell a domain name for whatever someone
offers you for it, but how would you know if you're about
to sell it for a lot less than it's really worth? To find
out, we'd recommend getting it appraised using Sedo.co.uk.
Development:
To develop a domain name basically means to create some 'history'
for it. A domain name with a history has a greater value
than one without. After all, getting listed on the major
search engines is hard enough, so if a potential buyer hasn't
got all the hard work and expense in getting established
with the major engines, it makes the sale even more attractive
to them - plus it could actually save them money in the future.
So how do I 'make history'? I hear you ask. Creating
quality history depends on how much work you're willing to
put in. You could simply park the domain with someone like
Sedo and
send as many people as possible to go and view the 'parked'
page. This will generate a record of traffic to the domain.
You could even invest in a 'Pay-per-click' (PPC) scheme in
which you place a sponsored link (to your parked page) in a
prime position on a search engine, and pay the search engine
each time the link is clicked on. This will gain greater exposure
to your domain name, but could also be quite costly, so be
careful if you have a budget to consider.
Another alternative
is to build a website for the domain name. The content should
be based on what the website could actually be used for by
your potential buyer, and yet it should still be advertising
it's availability for sale. The idea behind this is to then
get your site listed in the main directories and databases
of all the major search engines, hopefully at a reasonable
ranking level for search terms relating to the meaning of the
domain name. Search engines love fresh content, so if you keep
your site maintained with new content, they will come back
more often to re-crawl your site, which will also favour your
rankings. Try not to let your site go stale! This is obviously
much more involved, but if your efforts are successful and
your potential buyer is serious, they will see the added value
behind your efforts, and your asking price should reflect this.
A useful tool for checking if a domain name
has a website history is the 'Way
Back Machine'. If the machine has visited a website,
it captures a copy of it for it's archive for that date. If
it revisits the site it will create another entry in it's database
and will indicate if it detects that the site has been updated
since it's last visit.
Parking Domains:
Why park a domain name? Where should it be parked?
Useful Resources:
Sedo -
Domain parking and professional appraisals
Way Back
Machine - Website archives
AddMe -
Search engine submission tool
Affiliate programmes
Domain name buying & selling
Website marketing strategies
Trading safely online
Premium
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