Web Site Design Blog

If you are thinking of buying a used domain, or an expired domain name, you’ll want to check a few things first to make sure you are getting something good, unless of course you just like the name.

First off, try the backlink checker, which will tell you what PR value is assigned to any of the backlinks

Or how about an entire page of research on that domain.?? Try this tool

Well, if you read our Search Optimization article about our bulk domain site you’ll recall that at that time we went from a zero google keyword rank to a #17 page rank in less than two days! And that not all the good news about search ranking… Now it appears that we are at the number 7, up 10 spots since we last visited. In other words we are now on the first page of Google! Yippee. Now on some ranking sites that show google position we are at number 12, but either way we have successfully optimized the site to a much better extent than we had for 9 years.
How did we do it? Well first of all we optimized the page, we compared it against several other sites and figured out why other sites were ranking even though we have had that site for 9 years. We changed the keywords in the home page. We did some background code, mostly alt tags. This is simply the on page optimization we did. When we got to the #17 rank we did a bit more. We increased the number of terms in our title tag.

Finally, we started doing some directory listings, blog posting and forum posting. This is all manual work but it does pay off.

We have a single site that was new by the way and we linked it off of the domain site to get it indexed and interestingly that site has a #8 position in Google for it’s keyword, again within only a week of the link exchange.

For so many years people balked at the concept of making money with web sites. I recall as a young laddy, how I approached so many businesses to do web site design. No one beleived in the web. Ahhh, but that is old news.

The new news is that now we have the quest for making money on the web, even where no money exists. the old adage “build it and they will come” no longer applies with the myriad of thousands of websites going up each week… or are they. What we have now is a new breed of webbie, the domainers, who simply purchase domains for the sake of adwords revenue and put them online to compete with real mom and pops and mid sized buys trying to make a buck out here in the wild blue yonder. I’m not knocking the domainers who buy cheap bulk domain names to impart their wares upon the world, but moreover seller beware, the market has been skewed. As long as Google continues to reward the “fake” site with ad revenue, they will continue to exist and they will compete with you.

Now we get back to the original reason for this post. The glory of making money on the web is still alive but it takes oh so much more work these days. Once you get a domain, your next step is to design it, position it, link it and advertise it. Then and only then can you really make money. Each of these steps takes an additional step or two as you’ve probably discovered.

1. Design it: You must design it not only aestetically, but also in terms of consumer perception. Clarity of purpose, ease of use.
2. Position it: Your website standing out looking beautiful at a particular address is like a house in the burbs. If you don’t give your guests directions and there is no map out there with a way to find them, pretty much no one will be coming to dinner. You must position your site somewhere that will actually get noticed. You need an angle, and again clarity of purpose, a singular direction from which visitors may arrive knowing clearly where you are on the map.

3.Link it: the best way to get a position is to link your site from other sites. You can start with directories, free directories and cheap directories, but until your site is located somewhere on the web, it is landlocked within it’s own domain.

4. advertise it: Many small owners make the mistake of avoiding advertising, google adwords, and the like due to cost. But if you have a few dollars a week to make a buck, you can easily afford to advertise some niche keywords to get started.

Remember, you are starting a business, not just a landlocked web site in the suburbs with no hope of anyone finding out. Google and other search engines are mere robots, not here to punish you, or make it difficult, but certainly don’t realize your frustration. Take a step back, look at your dilema and make things happen that are logical from a robotic point of view. Spend a few hours a week on your website and in a few months you should be able to position yourself on a shoe string.

Good luck~!

Have a question? Make a comment

We decided to test a few search optimization tools to see which ones would work best on determining keyword density for a particular site that we are optimizing. The site in question is one of our own. We wanted it to rank for “Bulk Domain Names” where it had absolutely no ranking at all. There are several factors to understand on this

1. The site does not have a keyword in the url

2. google did recognize it as a “domain name” and hosting site (as determined by adwords)

3. the site is 9 years old, neglected and has 2 backlinks from one of our other sites.

4. the site has a PR rank of 4

5. We rank #17 (within only two days) under “Bulk Domain Names”

We tried several tools and here is our analysis:

1. http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html / This is an impressive tool. Well laid out, great for understanding aspects of search optimization, but unfortunely it only noted our keywords as a single digit, and no density to speak of.

2. http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/index.php / This is a nice tool, and it does show that the word “domain” has a density of 9.07% (104 times). (and who told you that using a keyword that many times would hurt you?). It also shows the word “bulk” used 8 times at density of .70% . Overall the information here is easier to read than our first choice, but still not completely adequate to see how 3 word keyword combinations will fare. It recognizes “bulk domain registration” over “bulk domain names” (we rank 37 on that combination) and “cheap domain names” as primary where we have no rank at all. Overall, this is a good tool.

3.http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php / This tool is fair. It shows the word domain as the most popular here, but doesn’t identify keyword combinations at all. However it does have an intuitive results page showing blatently in sizing what is most prevelant on the page.
4. http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html / unfortunately this tool won’t analyze the page as our page appears to be too long.

5. http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/keyword-density.html / This one does very well. It does recognize our 3 word term as #13 on it’s list of 3 word keywords, at 0.42% density. It recognizes a few others where we don’t rank at all. It also ranks our two word term as #5 with a density of 1.84%. Overall this is the most impressive so far of the tools.

6. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/ This one ranks us well and is well organized. It recognizes our two word term at 0.59% density, at #5 on the list along with (unfortunately) some words where we don’t rank at all. It recognizes our two word at .90%. On this tool you can only run 1,2, or 3 words separately so it would be time consuming, but like the linkvendor tool it does report somewhat accuratley.

7.http://www.keyworddensity.com/search_engine_optimization/keyword_density.cgi / This one is a bit difficult to understand. However what it does show is that this term is in 3 places. 1 time in visible text, one time in title, and one time in reference tags with a keyword density in the alt tag of 4.2 % . “cheap domain registration” that shows up with the highest keyword density in other tools shows in keywords, description and alt tags and image tags (ie, id=” “) at 12-13.88% but as we know doesn’t rank. Lending us to suspect that although this is an interesting tool, it doesn’t easily get us to where we are going.

this brought up an interesting item… “alt tags” “paypal domain registration” has an alt tag density of 8.33% - 6 times. “Bulk domain names” has no alt tags and yet has a better rank. Certainly there are other things lending to this, but this again is an interesting tool.

8. http://googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php / BINGO. this tool so far most accurately shows what we are looking for. It pulls in our keyword as the 2nd best 3 word term at 2.41% and pulls in the first place winner at 4.82% although we actually rank 37th on google for this term. By far the most accurate of knowing which terms have the greatest density, this tool is still not entirely accurate. but our overall winner so far.

9. http://www.submitexpress.com/cgi-bin/analyzer/meta.pl / Sorry but after our last tool, using this was definately a flatline. Not a mention of our keywords here. Looks extensive but in reality, not good.

10.http://www.trafficzap.com/keydensity.php / Okay, if we already had a number one site this tool would be fine. Basic but fine. The problem is the keyword that we actually rank on shows up as if insignificant at 2.59%. There is no 2 or 3 word keywords so unless we were able to rank on the word “domain” which I doubt, this tool doesn’t cut it.

11. http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml / This tool if configured in a certain way, that certain way that google is looking would be good also. But the hitch is, okay, do we really know the google algo to make this tool tell us what we need. Probably not. Therefore it’s somewhat not helpful. If we choose include page title, alt tags, and description it’s almost accurate.

12. http://developers.evrsoft.com/seotool/ / ever feel like you are really spamming a page to get ranked? Well this tool will convince you that you’re not. It’s a pretty good tool. It doesn’t actually decode what we want, but it does tell us quite a bit about what we have done. We’ll rate it useful but not for what we are attempting to do. For beginners.

13. http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php / Okay, we used this a couple of years ago and it’s quite good. It shows the keyword prominence of our term at 51.43%. Which as you know is by far the best understanding of the way that google works. The Ontology finder on this site is also excellent. I shouldn’t be so smug about this, but in fact this is the tool I have been searching for again. This site hasn’t been updated since 2004, but obviously they were onto something.

14. and just for fun for those of you who are visual try http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/

Well, that concludes this evenings post. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. Overall I’ll make a note here for two things that we will be working on during the next few days.

a. we plan to work with gorank and find more useful ways to boost our current two day rank

b. we plan to take another look at googlerankings

c. plan to take a look at our competitors and see how we can improve our ranking against them.