Week 2
Let's Get Serious

It is Week 2 of our weekly newsletter. Okay this week it is time to get serious and start to build some serious techniques. Last week I looked at the website North Haven Homes and I went through some on-page SEO techniques. This week we will see some of the results we have already achieved with this site.

We are also going to look at whether or not to Buy and Existing Domain or a New and we will also be looking at two tools every webmaster should be using, Yahoo List and Google Sitemaps.

============The Web Business In Focus ================
How to get a good ranking site? To Buy and Existing Domain or A New One

Over the last few weeks I have been working with a number of clients to buy their dot com domain names. Some of these companies are people like Metbar and North Haven Homes. One of the questions I am often asked from newbies in this game is whether we should Buy an Existing domain or whether to buy a new name no one has never used before.

Well, the answer is quite simple, Buy an Existing Domain where possible but Buyer BeWare! Over the last few months I have been brokering deals to buy existing domains but one thing I have found is that some of the domains that are up forsale have been used in the past for unsavoury things. One of the outcomes to this is that the domain you may have purchased might simply be banned. If this is the case then you might have an up hill battle trying to get this ban overturn.

One of the steps I do before I agree to buy an existing domain is to check whether or not it exists in the Search engine index, in particular in the top 3 which are -

                     - Google.com
                     - Yahoo.com
                     - MSN.com

If the domain already exists in the index then you know the domain is ok. If it doesn't exist in the index you may need to do a little digging. If it doesn't exist in just one of the search engine indexes you really need to start digging or make sure you check what was on the site before hand.

One of the reasons why I like to buy existing domains, is that they may already have a presence online and a good PR Rating with Google. A site that has a high PR Rating from scratch will be easier to get ranked well than one that isn't.

When you are buying domains you can get some really sweet deals. There are many sites that sell existing domains like -

http://www.buydomains.com

These sites will have on them, what the owner wants, but often you can negotiate on the price. I recently purchased the domain ThaiDelivery.com. It is for an upcoming project and the owner wanted something like $1,888 USD dollars. I simply said to them I could only afford a certain price. They went away and eventually settled on a figure around $800 USD.

When you are dealing with these sorts of people, it is like any commodity, simply negotiate the best deal. Some of my other clients have secured their dot com, domain names for just a couple of hundred dollars. But sometimes you will have to pay. I have one client who had to pay over $5000 USD for their dot com domain. They were simply over a barrel and had to pay but this is a rare experience.

If you want to find out if a domain is available or not simply visit a site like MelbourneIT and do a search for the domain at - http://www.melbourneIT.com.au If the domain is already available simply do what we call is a WHOIS search. On the MelbourneIT site you will see a WHOIS link. Simply click on it and type in the domain you are searching for.

You will find at the end of the search all of the details as to who owns the domain. If you want that domain simply contact the domain administrator and see if they are prepared to sell the domain. You just never know, they might be prepared to do so.

The other way to find a really cool domain is to buy one that is about to be deleted or has expired. Often when you do a WHOIS search, it may tell you that the domain is still owned by someone, but if you go to the website - http://www.deleteddomains.com it will tell you whether the domain is about to be deleted. This is the time to secure your domain as you can buy the domain for next to nothing.

For example I did a search on the term wildlife and I found the following domains were about to be deleted -

wildlife-preserve.net	Deleted
wildlifeadv.net	Deleted
wildlifeamerica.net	Deleted
wildlifepreservationist.net	Deleted
wildlifepreservationists.net	Deleted
wildlifepreserves.net	Deleted

If you were into wildlife then these domains would be worth having a look at. One thing I should note is that the search tool on http://www.deleteddomains.com only returns .org or .net search terms. If you pay their fees you get access to all search terms. This is a tool that is worth having a look at when you are first starting out.

============ Tools You Must Simply Have ===================

Every site must be using both a Google Sitemap and a Yahoo List. I have found that using both of these tools helps ensure that all of your webpages actually get indexed. There are a number of SEO experts who have raised issues about using Google Sitemaps but in my experience they have been more of a help than a hinderance.

One thing to not though, is that if you are using a Google Sitemap or Yahoo List and selling download products, don't include the download pages in the List or Sitemap or those pages are going to get indexed and people will be able to get your products for free. The other point to this is that you should also be using Robots.txt files to tell all the Search Engine Indexes whether they should be indexing your pages.

Setting up a Google Sitemap is pretty straight forward. First you register with Google at Google.com. Then you simply choose the Webmaster Central option and then choose the Sitemap option. When you are in the Sitemap application Google will require you to put a html page onto your site with a specific name. Google gets you to do this to prove that you actually own the site. Google Sitemap has some very powerful information - it tells you where your domain shows up in certain keyword search in the Google index but also it tells you what keywords people are using to search for your site and then click on your site.

This information in conjunction with your weblogs means that you can truly track how successful your SEO techniques have been. It also means that you can find out, if you have a new domain whether or not your domain exists in the Google index.

The next steps for the Google index is to add a sitemap. The Google Sitemap system requires you to use an XML Sitemap where as the Yahoo List system, simply gets you to add a text file to your website and on each new line add you webpages. Once you have added your Google Sitemap you simply tell Google the name of the sitemap and then you are all done.

Each time you add a webpage you simply add the page to the sitemap and the Yahoo list and when Google and Yahoo crawl to your site they will use this information to try and index all your pages. In the Google sitemap system you can also resubmit your sitemap to Google each time you add a new webpage.

If you would like help with Google Sitemaps or the Yahoo List (Yahoo Site Explorer) we can provide consulting assistance in this area. Simply contact me using the details below.

============= This Weeks Articles For Your Review ==========

1. Is All Web Traffic, Good Traffic

============ Case Study - North Haven Homes =============
Last week I talked about how to improved North Haven Homes to get them to rank well using just simply on-page search engine optimisation techniques. The keywords I was working towards the company ranking well on were -

- Townsville Home Builder
- Townsville Construction Company

Well in just one week they now rank in the number one spot for "Townsville Construction Company" on both Google and Yahoo. This weekend I took control of the NorthHavenHomes.com.au website and I anticipate that it will be in the number one spot for "Townsville Home Builder" as well in the not to distant future.

The reason it was so easy to optimise using only on-page seo techniques was that the keywords are not very competitive but as we get into more competitive keywords like - Queensland Home Builder, or Queensland Investment we will have to employ off-page seo techniques.

If you can't remember what areas I improved last week simply go back and have a look at last weeks newsletter, it is still online.

================== Your Questions ==================

1. Can All Wordtracker Results be trusted?

The answer to this is Yes and No. Up until a few months ago I would have said a resounding Yes but recently I have had a number of situations where the results in WordTracker do not reflect actual results. I recently purchased a certain domain based on WordTracker results but found that when the site ranked in the Number One position on all three major Search Engine indexes the site actually got no hits or virtually no hits at all on the keywords we had chosen.

I had never seen this before with WordTracker results but obviously in this case the number of hits per day were not a true reflection of the actual search engine results. This site should have been getting around 200 hits at least a day. But I will say this is an extremely rare situation and I have never seen this before.

If you ever have doubts about the number of hits a site might get for a certain keyword, then simply setup a Google Adwords account and use it to see how many impressions the keyword actually gets. This concept was one used by my colleague to validate the WordTracker results.