While this technique may be a bit ‘gung ho‘ for new arrivals to the WWW it’s certainly something Blog Briefing readers need to be aware of ( if they aren’t already) and that is that you can seriously jump start your new site(s) by seeking out and purchasing an expiring Domain name. So why might you want to do that?

Literally thousands of domains are NOT going to be renewed by their current owners! So you might want to think about snapping one of these up. Their current owners do not realize the value of their asset. An aged domain, make no mistake, is an asset – not just for ranking purposes but monetarily too.

Here’s a few reasons why:

Google recognizes that an ‘aged’ domain has a ‘track record’ on the web and this plays a serious part in their multiple, secret recipe, ‘tick the box’ algorithm of how to RANK a domain for assorted keywords.

Put it this way: If you and I were in competition for a particular search ‘phrase’ and my domain was a 5 year old .com and yours was a brand new ‘just out of the box’ .com – Google would rank me higher than you – even if you had more back links than I did! Probably even if the search term phrase we were both targeting keyword was not in my domain’s name but was in yours.

But when buying an aged domain the chances are it already has a fair amount of ‘aged’ backlinks too! Double Whammy!

So while purchasing a new domain name, preferably a .com/.net/.org with your main keywords in is smart ( for now – but that may change in the future folks!) domain age will always play a major part in how Google rates your site’s authority and where they will rank you in the SERPS ( Search Engine Results Pages).

In fact by finding and purchasing an old domain and just linking to your ‘new’ site from it can do your rankings the power of good.

I have bought a few old domains in the last 12 months either to ‘mark ‘em up and move ‘em on’ or to sit on them, with an optimized WordPress blog, for a future sale or project.

“Yeah, yeah Clive,” I hear you say, “but how do I even go about looking into that potential market?”

I use Domain Samurai ( anyone reading other posts here will know I’m a big fan of Market Samurai for keyword research and this is a new project from their ‘dojo‘).

And it’s free!

Here’s our old friend Dr Anthony with an overview of Domain Samurai:

1. Domain Samurai helps you to find keyword optimized domains, which boost your rankings in the search engines;

2. You won’t be asked to pay a penny for Domain Samurai – it’s being given away to you at no cost;

3. AND if you want even more… Plug Domain Samurai into “DomainFace“, and get access to their high value Aged Domain data feeds.

Then, use this data to discover PageRank 4 or 5 domains, keyword optimized domains, domains with backlinks, rankings and traffic – in your industry – often selling for as little as a few dozen dollars.

(Imagine using these domains to overtake the big players in your niche in just weeks – instead of building your site up slowly over months and years!)

Relevant links for this post:

• Domain Samurai (free)
  
• Domain Face
• Wayback Machine a great way to find out the content any domain name had in years gone by – kind of like an internet time machine!

Good old Anthony from Market Samurai does it again – why the heck would I create my own rambling videos when Dr A. does it so well? These are the tactics I use ( or get my Outsource Staff to use) on all my sites. Doubled my income + by the way!

Best of all this is all totally ‘White Hat’ so no dodgy backlinking info here.

So listen/watch up as, in the following 3 videos, Anthony takes you through the VITAL backlinking processes ( but check out my comments below and feel free to add your own):

VIDEO#1: Backlink Basics

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VIDEO#2: Authority and Quality Backlinks

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VIDEO#3: Backlinks Pingback Magic

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Useful links for these tutorials:

• Market Samurai
• The Open Directory
• The Yahoo Directory

Here’s the Intro to our Social Media Video Series. 8 videos in all to give you a handle on this ‘social’ stuff! As well as your day to day backlinking TO DO stuff you need to make sure that you and your site are ‘up there‘ as far as all those Social Networks are concerned.

Yep, it’s a drag at first -but once your site starts ranking higher I suspect you’ll regard it as a job well done…

This is the Intro video of an 8 part video series:

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• Social Media Intro (you are here)
• Using Facebook
• Using Twitter
• YouTube
• Squidoo Lenses
• Podcasting
• Blogging & RSS
• Integrating It All!
  

If you want to find out if Google has noticed your lovely new WordPress blog yet, and put it in their SERPS (search results) here’s how to find out:

Type into Google’s Search Box this:

site:yoursitename.com

or, if you want to see if a specific post or page has been indexed yet:

site:yoursitename.com/pagename-or-postname/

P.S. I suggest you make sure that your site is indexed by Google before you even think about creating back links to boost your rankings!

Why? Because maybe the Google Gods will consider it odd that 500+ sites are linking to your site when you only built it yesterday, it has no content and is not yet in their Index! Be sensible folks!

Don't make Google angry!

So if your site doesn’t show up, what to do?

Digg.com

Sign up for a free account, if you don’t have one already, and submit your site stating, simply that it’s new, you’re proud of it, and want to share it with the world! Obviously you can do that for individual posts later ( using whatever Bookmarking plugin you’ve installed – I like Sexy Bookmarks which you can see below this post) – but just ‘Digging’ your own posts is not a good idea ( ask some friends with Digg accounts to do it for you!) and make sure to ‘Digg’ lots of other peoples stuff on Digg so you’re not seen as just a self-promoting spammer!

Craigslist.org

Create a free account and place an ad to your site in the relevant category. It won’t always be accepted but it’s worth a shot.

The thing is that’ sites like Digg, Craig’s List etc. are super popular so Google visits those sites super fast and therefore your new site gets found super fast too!

You are, if you like, piggy backing on these regularly ‘crawled’ sites – and nothing wrong with that – it’s like waving to Google and saying, “HEY, over here!” and the fact is that Google will see you waving and come over to check you out and place your site in their big Google Index. Hurray!

There are lots of other sites that Google value/rate highly and therefore visit regularly that you can do this on, but don’t OVERDO it – remember this is only to get your site in Google’s index quickly. I’ll discuss in other posts about how to use Social Bookmarking and Networking sites to give your sites rankings a boost.

Quick Postscript:

I wrote this tutorial as I’d churned out a quick promotional blog over the weekend (today’s Tuesday)  – but before writing the post I noted, using the technique above, that Google did not know my site existed and so I submitted to Digg ( thinking I’d do Craig’s List later – but NO NEED!)

Guess what?……

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When I finished writing this short post, it took me maybe 30 minutes to do, I checked again and my site was indexed in Google. Voila!

• Here’s the blog in Google
• Here’s the Digg Post

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Keeping Google happy via a SEO Sitemap is probably the easiest Search Engine Optimization you’ll ever do on your site(s) or those of your clients.In the previous video tutorial about Google Webmaster Tools (which I return to at the end of the video tutorial below) I mentioned Sitemaps and how important they are.

The fact is that with a WordPress blog this is such an easy thing to do that you might be forgiven for thinking it not important – no way!

In the bad old days of static HTML web sites this was a really onerous thing to put in place but, for smart WP afficionados such as us, we have two ways to do this ( done once and forgotten never to be addressed again) both of which can be put into place double quick.

It’s amazing to me that 90% of blog owners don’t do this – maybe because:

• They don’t know how
• They don’t undertand the power of Plugins
• They can’t see the benefits of premium themes (which BTW in this case is a Premium theme from Woo but a freebie!)

Links Related to this Tutorial:

• SiteMap XML Plugin: This WordPress plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will aid search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. to much better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it that much more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Plus it notifies all the main search engines every time you create a post with new content. Magic!
• Woo Themes: Go and find the free theme used in the tutorial – it’s called ‘Mainstream’ - very cool indeed but no Support on offer as it’s a freebie which is fair enough.

This is one of the first SEO things to do even before your blog has much or any content. They’ll also come in useful later when you’re a blogging superstar!

It’ll only take you 3 minutes and is as good a way as any to let Google know your site exists. Will it get your site indexed on Google quickly? Maybe.

What will be useful in the future is you are able to discover whether the GoogleBot has any problems crawling ( and hence indexing) your site’s content – posts and pages. If it does you will find out here and fix the issue. This will also optimize your search engine rankings. Happy days!

For example if you’ve deleted a page on your site yet are still linking to it from others the tool tells you what those pages are so you can edit the naughty posts and edit those obsolete links out.

It will also give a quick snapshot of popular search terms by which people found your site – it’s not Google Analytics but you’re going to register there too right?

My only caveat ( to both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics) is that I reckon they should be avoided if your blogs are the ‘made-for-adsense’ type sites. My suspicious mind tells me that giving Google extensive permission to track everything that happens on your site is not a good idea when people find you in a Search, stay 10 seconds – just long enough to click an ad – and never come back.

Maybe Google records all that stuff anyway but if you’ve got Tools and Analytics installed they definitely do – and they won’t like your site much!

So, if that applies to you, I’d suggest setting up a free Statcounter.com account to track your visitors and how they found you.

Links/Tools mentioned in this tutorial:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Filezilla
  

Getting your site ranked on the first page of Google for a search phrase is intensely satisfying, especially against stiff competition. Not getting ranked anywhere is soul destroying! But don’t take it personally because the chances are good that it’s you that are screwing up and not Google just being nasty and vindictive!

Oh yes, and as I’ve said before, when I say ‘Google’ I really mean ‘all search engines’ but I couldn’t find a photo of a pretty girl with a t-shirt that said ‘All Search Engines‘ on it!

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Plugin and programs I used to get the result shown in the video:

• The All-in-one-SEO plugin for WordPress – an essential free plugin for your blog to make it more Google friendly
  
• I Way Links – a quick way to get good back links to your site
• Directory Maximizer – get your site listed in online directories and bookmarking sites – cheap!
  

Glossary of terms used in this tutorial:

• SEO – Search Engine Optimization, generally tweaks made on your site to make search engines love you.
• SEM - Search Engine Marketing, generally stuff you do off site, e.g. link building, to make search engines love you.
• Organic Search – Somebody types a search phrase into Google and your site appears in the rankings hopefully on
• SERP’s – S.earch E.ngine R.esults P.ages
• Sponsored Link – Where people pay to have their site appear in search results for specific search terms.
• Source Code – the code that sits behind all web sites that you computer translates into the web site you see in your browser.
• Meta – i.e. Meta Description: a description of your site in the code and more for the search engines than your site’s visitors as it appears on the source code (although sometimes it becomes the description Google uses to describe your site.

So what is a ‘Link Wheel’ or ‘Solar System Link’ exactly? Well whatever you want to call it, it’s a great SEM technique to get authoritative back links to the page you want to promote up the search engine rankings.

It doesn’t have to be your Home Page by the way, it can be any page on your site. In fact take that snippet of info and hold onto it for future info – not every link has to point back to your Home page!

N.B. Don’t use this on a brand new blog! Leave it a couple of months until you get some real visitors naturally or via other link building methods.

This tutorial’s funky backlink sites list:

• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Squidoo.com
• Tumblr.com
• WetPaint.com
• Vox.com
• PageFlakes.com
• Quizilla.com
• Weebly.com
• Friendster.com

Useful tool for this method of backlinking

• The Best Spinner: ensuring that the ‘content’ you put on each of these Web 2.0 properties is different.

Hey! If we want to rank well on Google it makes sense to see what they have to suggest re our KWP! Cool info!

In this video tutorial you’ll discover how to do some quick and clever research using Google that you probably don’t even know about. Certainly not many of your competitors do!

This is probably the fastest way to find out what people are typing into that Search box when they’re looking for a site like yours.

For more in depth keyword research, via a free Google tool, check out another keyword research video here.

Glossary of term used in these tutorials:

• Search Volume – the number of searches typed in by Googlers over a set period of time. This is never exact though so cross reference with other research tools.
• csv – comma separated values for importing data into spreadsheets like…
• Excel – Microsoft’s proprietary spreadsheet software – see link below for free alternative if you don’t have it.

Relevant links for these tutorials:

• Google External Keyword Tool
• Open Office – free ‘Microsoft Office’ style, but Open Source, software download including spreadsheet software if you don’t have Excel – I use this on all my computers never having felt the need to pay for Microsoft Office!
  

Links are one the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. The more links you have, the better off you are. But should we be White Hat about it, Lone Ranger style?

Or, again Lone Ranger style, try and hide our true identity from the world?

Other sites linking to yours, what kind of sites they are and how they link to you plays a massive part of Google’s ‘algorithm‘ – the constantly changing formula that’s used to determine where your site, and its pages and posts, should rank for keyword or keyword phrase searches.

Blimey! The amount of words and theories that have been written or conjectured about that bloody Google algorithm!

Now there are people out there on the big WWW selling $10,000+ courses on mastering this technique ( i.e. interpreting Google’s algorithm) but there are also hundreds of cheap e-books or courses with the latest trick/cheat/loophole to game the system and ‘trick’ Google into ranking your site higher than it deserves to be ranked!

There are SEO firms who haven’t a clue, and some who do, but essentially unless they are promoting ‘best practise’ they and their clients will soon be f*****. That’s the way it is.

SO, big bucks or small, cheating Google’s algorithm long term can’t be done because, apart from hiring the smartest minds around, the Big G can change the rules at any time – and they DO! I’m not saying I like it, but  that’s the reality and don’t let any snake oil salesman tell you otherwise!

Rant over, sorry, but….

Now that I’ve got the Lone Ranger image in my head I feel another analogy coming up ( you’ll like this one, sound FX the whole shebang!):

White Hat, Grey or Black, the point is that it’s  pretty simple to promote yourself effectively without upsetting the Google Gods

• Your page is optimised for the ‘search term’ the Googler has typed in
• The content they find is interesting enough that they don’t ‘click off’ your page within a couple of milliseconds ( Google KNOWS that!)
• Your on page SEO is geared up for that ‘search phrase’ but is not ‘over the top’ – which is how Google decide that you are ‘in contention’ in the first place.
• Other sites link to you – preferably with that same, or similar, search phrase in the link to you, and/or the descriptive text around the link, on there site. It’s therefore seen by Google to be a highly relevant back link.
• You don’t, overnight, suddenly have thousands of other sites linking to you when Google’s Algorithm is registering that you’ve only ever had 100 visitors and most of the time that was YOU! Trust me, the Google Gods know!

I could go on and on all blooming day but…
Once you take away all the crap and clever stuff it all boils down to this:

Google wants to give the best possible search results to their users – period!

and you will be rewarded for helping them to do that simple thing – that makes sense right? So why does everybody make it so complicated?

Because so many people are looking for  a quick buck, the fast fix or the latest shortcut. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for shortcuts but am also smart enough to know that ‘quick buck’ methodologies are, by definition, short term and  a shortcut can sometimes mean driving off a cliff to get to the bottom fast!

I’m no angel and if you want to flirt with the ‘Black Hat -Dark Side’ of SEM I’ll help as much as I can because, if done right, for short term gain it can work. But if you are somebody who is promoting an offline business or your one ‘big time’ blog – let’s not go there. But I’ll be happy to discuss the Good, the Bad and the Ugly if you wish.

From my experience, wearing that ‘White Hat’, you just have to temper your enthusiasm for a page to achieve #1 ranking with a ‘slowly, slowly catchee monkey‘ approach. Sure use some automation techniques, a shortcut or two but combine it with good SEM (Search Engine Marketing) practice which may or may not wander into slightly ‘Grey Hat’ territory from time to time.

Believe me when I tell you that if your site has less than 500 pages of content, is not earning a bucket load of money from Adsense and has less than 500 incoming links it is unlikely that the Google Gods are going to be focusing on you anyway!