With my annual doctor's appointment scheduled for next week, I thought I'd implement some sort of medical theme in today's post. You see, my upcoming visit is for my yearly physical examination which helps determine how healthy I am as a person. This inspection is very important and allows me to fix or correct any bad trends I may be doing to my body before permanent damage is done. This same concept can be used towards domaining. There are a few things we need to review at least on a yearly-basis to make sure our domain portfolio is "healthy" and "robust". I have listed some tips and suggestions below for helping your domains stay fit, trim and effecient. Welcome to your Domain Name Annual Check-up.
The Parking Exam: Manually check the status of each domain name in your portfolio. This may take some time but I'll explain how it is beneficial. Each one of your domains needs to be either developed for traffic or parked for revenue. This is important. You see, most domain registrars that sell domains have a default status your purchased domain goes into that allows that registrar to park your domain for free, with no benefit of receiving any sort of income from traffic or clicks. You can fix this. The name servers for each of your domains needs to either point towards a domain parking program that allows you to monetize visitor traffic or towards a developed website that allows visitors to interact and use. Allowing the default server settings to stay on your new domain purchases does not benefit you at all since visitors that click or visit the webpage will ultimately be putting money in the pocket of the registar and not the owner. It's your domain name, so take advantage of monetizing the traffic by choosing a free domain parking provider like Sedo while you decide on what to do with your new domain.
The SEO Exam: During this exam, we will be checking the search engine optimization of your developed domain names that have a working website. Metatags, keyword tags and Google page placement are just a few things that are important in determing the health of a domain name. Better SEO means better publicity, which in turn means better value for the domain. Do yourself a favor and check out sites like SEObook, SEOchat and BruceClay to familarize yourself with simple things you can do to help optimize your SEO and tweak more value into your domains.
The Backlink Exam: Who's linking to your domain names? You don't know? Well find out by using tools such as iWebTools Backlink Checker to see which other websites are directly linking to your domain names. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink. Feel free to inform us of your own domain-related websites for the upcoming Link Love Monday article, where we show some love by posting links to interesting domaining websites suggested by our readers. Enjoy the free link from us!
The Whois Exam: Correct, complete and proper Whois information is a very imporant detail in the well-being of a domain name. Not only does it serve as a means for a potential buyer to contact you regarding the possibility of purchasing your domain, but it also is used to confirm a certain domain is registered to a certain person or business. Take a few minutes and check the Whois information of your domains at Whois.net, Internic and Who.is. If you want to protect your privacy when it comes to your domain name registrations, opt to use a proxy buying company or pay the small extra fee offered by most registrars to activate private registration.
The Sales Price Exam: So you've listed some of your domains for sale. Great! Traffic is good and steady but hey, if the domain is so valuable, why is no one offering to buy it? Good question. It's not that the domain is not wanted, it's just that the sale price may be too high. Face it, the asking price on most domains listed is pretty ridiculous. With the recent sales of premium domains, it's easy for a domainer to believe they are sitting on a multi-million dollar portfolio. Truth is, if your domain is up for sale and you've either received no requests to buy or traffic is minimal and scarce, you probably have it listed too high. Re-examine the domain for sale and check current trends or fads that may have caused you to list the high price when you initially purchased it. Edit your sales price, list it again and entertain any reasonable offers you receive. Keeping the sale price too high almost guarantees you either having to reg it again or confining the domain to a life of obscurity. You bought it to sell it, so multiply your chances of receiving an offer by pricing it fair and reasonable.
The Expiration Exam: Dropped domain purchasing is a huge aftermarket niche. You can believe that every single day, there are a growing number of domainers that search and hunt the newest dropped domains and scoop them up, some of the time without the original domain owner even knowing their precious domain is available to be bought! This can be a huge nightmare, believe me, I know. Protect yourself by checking the expiration on all your domains and setting them to automatically renew. You can thank me later.
The Competitors Exam: Pull up Google and search for your domain keyword. Notice the paid for Google Adwords sponsor links that pop up in the search page? These are your competitors. These websites have paid to have their domain automatically invade the page when a certain keyword is searched for. These sponsor links are there to take traffic away from your site. Research these competitors and know thy enemy.
Utilizing these 7 simple domain tips can help add value to your domains and increase your peace of mind when it comes to the "health" of your entire domain portfolio. Take the time to examine your name investments on a regular basis to avoid costly mistakes or negative trends in efficiency.
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