Domain Owl

Goal setting is important in any business enterprise. But when resources and ongoing fees are involved time is of the essence. Organizing your time with respect to domain management and domain development should play a role in appraising. Here are  five things to consider when making a development plan for a domain you own or when looking an extra name acquisition or a renewal for an existing domain name.

1. Estimate Daily Time Contribution

Too many domainers try to make new websites on the fly, skipping steps and cutting corners. These shortcuts are taken for reasons of time. Better sites in more critical stages of development will get robbed for this “extra child”.If there is a better time to put pressure on yourself or your team for launch mode, then reschedule the buy or delay the domain development project start date.

Set goals for future domain value, progressive page rank, Google SERP result position and ad revenue which are realistic in scale to the time devoted to that single website. Have a completeness in your domain marketing plan and business agenda that provides elasticity for best decision making for development resources like hosting, link promotion, and content planning.

2. Handoff Support

Look for ways to get exterior contributions made to the site without you logging in  for a few days. This gives the domainer a break and allows them to get some perspective. Handoff support can mean that the domainer can absorb a new technology, attend a trade conference, and or spend time with the family/staff without being a slave to the mobile phone. But the overall site development impetus is not lost as a hidden cost.

3. Dot to Dot Domaining

This is like the fast-track product development model, with a twist. By quick hitting on everything from website design to web hosting to SEO building to content spinning, a site can be up in no time. Improving the site is always an option. But many ops forget the elastic nature of the web and stall a site launch over endless “tweaking”. Fast tracking a domain to a site can free up time for real required development, such as link building, product fulfillment, or communication with clients and customers.

4. SEO Strategy

So many theories abound on how site optimization for search engines works today it’s almost a lucky guess. The basic domain development model that never changes is to build a site with unique content and individual participation options for eligible site visitors.This should not be overly ambitious and should be based on research.

Theoretically the search engines should assign premium values to such a site. But the plan for the site should include benefits and rewards from user participation and content authoring, not just dollar signs.

Understanding the relationship of your site’s SERP ranking and the stages of development it must pass through is key. Search engines don’t like colors or Flash or any particular theme. But the calendar has to have a start date to establish beginning metrics. Hanging up site launch for some hidden x-factor that will punch your site to optimum results is unrealistic.

Site SEO begins on day 1 of your site, and it can never begin if you have no site up. Reworking a site map later is a task for a rainy day. But getting the message out should be a full time job if you have researched your site purpose well. Many anterior networks of marketing and domain promotion require site urls and a domain to register them properly.

5. Deputation

Learn to deputize. Holding on tight to the project until it screams for mercy annoys all your team members. Unless you can let others lead, learn to assign areas of responsibility to others and allow them to grow into positions of accountability. This imputes distrust and a tendency to implode and play drama queen. Nothing says trouble like this.

Everyone has a personal boundary in a collaboration. When it is crossed, some individuals try to save the situation. Others become angry. Some may actually leave. Every domain development project should have assigned backup areas and cross training to prevent an entire site from depending on the wellness, attitude and availability of one single person.

If you think alienating contractors is a never ending privilege, guess again. Those horror stories about people taking off or quitting in the middle of the project usually involve clients who make demands so over the top the provider gives up and flees. All the brainstorming and all the communication has just walked away with no intention of coming back.

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The overdesigned site continues to create traffic opportunities for domainers. Tapping web rage at an incompetently designed (and poorly constructed) website yields fresh ideas for new sites that will attract traffic as the frustration with the company destination site grows. The same tricks the website uses to improve SEO strands the customer at the website, click after click.

For many domain name owners, finding the niche to get traffic is difficult to pinpoint. But the poor showing many websites make, even  glossy superbrand sites, embarrasses their company and offers a savvy webmaster a chance to shine. These are sites for companies like Target, Starbucks, and Rite Aid/CVS. Their unwillingness to proffer data and grudging inability to offer up the very information people seek is blindingly inept.

Why have a search bar with such poor results? Why bind a shopping customer to a buying decision before basic information is revealed? Why limit product availability and pricing data behind a login ? These types of website gimmicks make visitors frustrated and time sensitive surfers furious. Sadly, customers are used to the un-usability of these sites. (And if you call the store, you get a recording referring you to the website!)

You can’t find anything. The Google result leads you to the landing page where the search has to begin all over again. The assumption is that the customer will keep clicking and clicking until the site makes them cry “uncle”.  There is no valid reason a database or a clickthrough path should be this awkward and nonsalutary. The frustrating “option” is to undergo the “Contact Us” maze.

It’s just very poor design that renders customers willing to anywhere else to  get the answers they need. But how conscious must the webmasters of the site be to have organized he site plan this way? If a heading says “Medical Summaries” and I click on the product name, why is the CVS site search result an alphabetical search bar when I already performed the search and clicked on the result? Why not have the result be the …medical summary?

I was trying to compare the cost of a prescription drug online and I ran into an ugly surprise. There are still websites whose functionality is so poor they cannot render a liveable result without extra clicks, extra searches, extra pulldowns, extra runaround. The silver cream should have been a one click product listing reachable in the one click I performed from the search engine.

The three pages of drugstore products with silver in them did not help. Worse, clicking on the default drug listing that matched my search result returned me to an alphebetical index I had to click and click and click again and again to dot to dot find the information listing. Laughably, my search for “silver sulfadiazine price”  got an apologetic “Sorry, no search results found.” How inept a website is that?

I checked other sites, but they were online order houses. The whole point was to determine which local drugstore to transfer my prescription to. Without price information what data could possibly determine my choice? Why did the pharmacy require a blind transfer irrespective of price, when everybody knows there is some kind of offer or bonus for transferring prescriptions?

And fishing through my email for lost passwords to drugstore accounts I really don’t use is another waste of time. How can this be a sound process? How can site visitors forgive this inefficiency? Because they feel they don’t have a choice. Because the toleration for poorly performing corporate sites has become ground in. Web site visitors need search engine result choices.

This is where the domainer comes in. A website can be made furnishing comparative price information for the vendors . This is the information the store had decided must be buried beneath layers of click-heavy obscurity. The domainer gives the clicking public a choice.

Thus the unwary surfer has a place to go, to solve their problem and get their information. The unnecessary repetition of information many domainers see on new sites suddenly has just become very necessary. True, the development task may not be easy. But a domain name based on even one product, with an updated list of chain store pharmacy prices could make search engine referred viewers very happy.

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Reading a book about Google was inevitable. This book was an eye opening primer in basic domain wisdom. But the knowledge inside the tome “What Would Google Do”‘ goes much further than any one online market segment. Written all the way back in 2009, much of the simplistic approaches to online business can be tooled especially to a domainer profit model.

Making smart mistakes, joining networks, and concentrating on delivering best product and nothing less is a welcome refresher. The concept that “life is  a beta” may be a soft sell to hard nosed domainers. References to the Google economy and the concept that middlemen are doomed may be up for debate or at least a half-hearted shrug.

The idea that “free is a business model” and that “nothing can compete with free” is being proven right now in realtime clicks and mortar stores with Panera bakeries. Neighboring eateries can’t compete with pay as you go prices. And Panera polishes its franchise with every chopped price. Google didn’t write the book (NPI) on business success but they do enjoy co-opting the brand.

Being collaborative is nothing new, neither is the concept of making mistakes well. Most industry advice books, especially in the tech related fields, emphasize trial and error. But this can be expensive for the everyday domainer. Thinking inside the gift economy, grabbing the freeware of the open source portal, and embracing the gift machine that is the Internet are all included.

Jeff Jarvis in “What Would Google Do” encapsulates and expands on his blog material from buzzmachine.com. If you are stranger to the blog this is all new news. Google and the Internet are indeed social media.And Jarvis explores several cases were the internet media is exploited incorrectly for public relations and profit motives. Jarvis preaches against being “evil”.

But somewhere the case is lacking that Google is guardian, the last bastion of a business seal of approval. The perception that a business operating outside the Google envelope needs to be “reformed’ may meet askance by several industry watchers. But Jarvis’ approach has brought new life to old company models. Is any business Google proof? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Domainers can best use this book as a tool to learn to think three dimensionally about to puncture and exploit captive domain traffic markets. Jarvis suggests giving control, respect and organization to customers, (which I seem to be alone in wishing more mobile customers of websites were on the receiving end of).  Information is power, but the idea that FaceBook is a “fake’ currency is intriguing.

Domainers can read this book and enjoy how Jarvis road maps certain domain markets and reveals potential domain name investment values to invest in. For a domain speculator to buy geo names or real estate names is nothing new, but it’s nice to hear a SEO expert say so too. Jarvis reports that the real estate market online is ripe for explosive development, and he’s right.

The application of Googlethink may not always heal. The case studies are contemporary, however, and deal with extremely relevant and updated business profit models such as airlines and “vanishing” newspapers are food for thought. Turning the customer experience around can make a domain (and its corresponding website) pay.

But a book spent evangelizing Googlification and Googlethink is not necessarily captivating reading. The success story wears thin because readers can’t start their own Google in the basement. Some readers may wonder how much of Jarvis’ advice can relate to markets where Google does not dominate, such as insurance and law. But maybe that’s for the next book.

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I read an article recently in Rolling Stone magazine about some computer hackers and the “crime of the century”. In trying to blog about it, I found an interesting conundrum: The top (series of) search engine result(s) from searching for the article was a blog review of the article by another blogger, not the magazine author. By Google searching the article title, the top page of search results was not the source, but the review.

Rolling Stone is proud to announce digital issues, but the title of this one article or searched keywords did not render a result even at the Rolling Stone site. This means that every mention or Twitter or email or Digg gets related back to the first online result, the same blog but not the copyrighted origin. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as stolen SEO.

Thus the source website yielded the SEO to the blogger. The blog author gave due credit and links to the source but the blog entry remains the top result for another author’s work. Yet it’s a mystery why the originating publisher would pass up an opportunity to get search result traffic. It’s hard to know the thoughts of a webmaster that stalls SEO discoverability and direct search engine referrals for putative digital subscriptions.

Stolen SEO should be a crime, but the individual leaving the door open are the source originators themselves. How many times have you found yourself using the Search bar at a given site, fruitlessly entering qualified terms, but not getting anywhere? These are the “light bulb” moments domainers and webmasters should tally in their tickler file of websites to build.

Target is a good example. I don’t go to Target.com because the search engine does not render results for products I know they have. Google searching should work, unless the clickthrough link pulls that scummy trick of landing the searcher at the landing page of the site, to begin the search all over again. IMOHO that is NOT a good search engine result. It creates work for shoppers.

How is this an opportunity for domainers? Domainers win when they conceive of a website that solves a problem and provides visitors with sticky content. Nothing could be more sticky than the search result for the item the web browser is looking for. One of the lamest excuses for imitation is that it’s flattering, but decades of Microsoft success prove you can’t “own” an idea.

If the store wanted to accessibly sell lawn chairs, it would maximize keyword efficiency.  But Target has left a window open for enterprising domainers. They can make a site featuring only those items inside the niche and save the shopper time, typing, and trouble. Any site that tries to encompass too broad an encyclopedia or catalog risks alienating visitors by this response failure. The elision of likely keywords from surgical results leaves the door open for enterprising web designers.

By shrinking the ugly cycle of scanning page of items after page of items at the store site, and waiting for all this to render, a site master can marry a city name or store name with an item to shop for and make a killer domain out of keywords they can optimize until the cows come home. This opportunity is available in markets heating up right now, like online coupons from sites like Dukky. Maybe users don’t want to wait for the next campaign and want the coupon now.

Why is this a domain development opportunity? Because a website owner of “Targetlawnchairs.com” could make a bunch of listings on the site and link them to the densely buried Target.com product listings. Surfing a densely niche targeted site for lawn chairs available at Target stores allows online discoverers to skip Search restarts and navigate back and forth through a million results.

Collecting information from online Web sources and redelivering it to the web visitor is not exactly rocket science. But it is webmaster science. Domainers can execute reasonable answers to online search query problems  and compose a likely site, and shrink the type in cycle for grateful web users. The traffic should tell the tale and  bring revenue and clicks.

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Owls Need Website Tools

The cycle of online domain evaluation tools can rise and fall with seasonal or economic changes. The data minions grubbing over their apps might be taking a Easter break or celebrating Kwanzaa when a webmaster visits their portal online and taps it for relevant domain SEO data.This is an ongoing part of domain name ownership, the red tape data that shows webmasters how effective certain programming aspects of their website really are.

But the data framesets revealed by these online instrument domain search portals can furnish some intriguing developments about where the site links and content end up. I found MyTracking.com (in the beta mode) to be an important study tool for researching online domain names, urls, links and sites of interest to me both inside and outside my portfolio.

I visited the MyTracking.com beta , and  enjoyed seeing the longitude and latitude of the domain displayed with a Google map. I now know that Godaddy has a wire hotel, co-location, or hosting NOC in Phoenix Arizona. Since I used to work at a company that was one circuit board away from the international backbone NOC in Phoenix, I feel like I’ve almost seen my own shared hosting server.

The “related pages” report at MyTracking.com was an eye opener. For one of my hosted domain sites, a website in Seoul was one of the five top seo linked pages. The domain was scanned as to having adult content or not, and the home page loading speed was clocked. I found this data item one I penciled in to check on all my sites. Shouldn’t a webmaster know how long the reference searches report the sites need to load?

The website for one of my ProBoards (also located in Phoenix, Arizona) was cited as a fast loading page, which I found interesting. This gave me pause as I always assumed the simple forwards to the community forum pages like ProBoards took longer to forward versus a natural hosted domain page url. I also espied one of my sites loading “slow”. I need to tweak that one to bring it into the “very fast” category.

Some sites I looked up has notations of “very fast” for the site loading procedure. I made a note to survey these sites and see how fast they loaded in my browser and find out where they were hosted. I liked being able to see which general areas loaded fast and which loaded very fast. I mean to look up the very fasts and see what website designs they are using.

What I really liked about the MyTracking.com beta research tool for domains was the instant in-record WHOIS link. That’s a nice touch that will take me to the detail of registrar right from thethe MyTracking result. This allows me to skip the (ahem) scratchy site design at my favorite registrar for WHOIS lookups. This data search link is especially handy when working with domains whose keyword combinations are very close together.

Also of extreme value to domainers using this website tool was the number of searchable pages at each url destination. One new site I had put up was searched at MyTracking.com, and the result showed no searchable pages.  That application build is coming down fast, I can tell you. As soon as the site map and new template is connected to the database I am checking it against MyTracking.com and getting the new metrics forthwith.

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Domain name buyers will want to extract every last SEO option from their web design toolbox. Certain advanced features and processes can be used to optimize a website and enhance its SEO value. Employing hands-on administrative tools can build the domain value at the edge of the website construction envelope.

1. Detail Your Database

The entry of every blog post and article story in a content editor is a database record. if you need to use a table and re-import the data, so be it. Copying and pasting large amount so keywords and terms can be easier this way. Inside the hosting account the file for the database can be downloaded. A database utility like MS Access or Excel conversion an showcase the raw website data.

Use Textalyser.net to verify search term density. Dates are not good search terms. Seeing the keywords, tags, and density laid out in a different format can change the webmaster’s perspective and improve the strategy of the site. The need for differentiation in search terms and tags is shown when the attributes are reviewed in table form. terms should relate back to the domain name.

Use actively searched synonyms of your best strategic search words and make sure  your search bar returns the highest result of these density terms in your articles or blog entry posts. Identify barren ranges of words that will furnish additional meaning for your readers and bots alike. Review attributes of the data table before uploading and reserve an extra “clean” copy of the database file before editing.

2. Hiding Content

For various reasons webmaster can hide content from specific searchability sources like Google. Evaluate these reasons for your site and coordinate areas of “hidden” code for greater SEO discoverability. Ads on the site can affect the way the search bots see your site and the indices they use to rank it. HTML comments can mask the ad density of your site. Evaluate if the domain name is served by the appearance of every ad present.

3. Building Categories

The inclusion of a category titled “uncategorized” in the mark of an amateur webmaster. A word that includes the search terms most densely used in those entries should be the new category term. The website’s domain name (and synonyms) should be present often. From time to time the direction the blog or site is taking may necessitate a formal reorganization or expansion of categories. Edit keyword tags to suit.

4. Site Reviews

A well written site review is a good idea for a blog entry or content article. Execute site reviews and conduct internet analysis in one go. Look for the sites for domain names close to yours. Study the way other sites are utilizing modern templates and popular applications. Compare web link, category management and ad placement. Researching other sites and their page ranking should be a regular domainer activity.

5. Submit the Site Plan

I was horsing around in my Godaddy account and I noticed for a few of my developed domains I had filed no “flight plan”. These site plans used to be a very good tool for mapping the relationships between pages and the intended  clickthrough pathway of any new user or return visitor to a website. Each domain name in your portfolio should have a site plan file in work. A site plan is a critical way to direct bots and reveal intended site architecture.

6. Evaluate Search Behaviors

How well known is your domain name? Websites online have available data and tools to return reports and data sets showing how bots and search engine indexing regards your site. Use Yahoo Search, Fastfind, and Zoom for paid search services. Make sure Google, Google API, Rollyo, Atomz and Alexa know who you and your website are.

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Are you missing out on tens of thousands of page views a day? Here’s a way to correct that.

From some comments I see my previous essay about making a website to capitalize on fanbases of the video community wasn’t quite descriptive enough. So today I will break down the details of TV/Movie cinema fanbase fansite model. The example is a website chronicling the love of two fictional doctors.  Two actors, Sandra Oh and Kevin McKidd have created this frenzy.

After discovering the glorious story arc of Dr. Cristina Yang and Major Owen Hunt in Seasons 5 & 6 of Grey’s Anatomy, I went on a Google tear looking for story summaries, character descriptions, dialogue quotes and episode descriptions. Discoverability was all over the place. people were sharing links and checking out sites talking about their favorite romance duo.

How do sites make money with this material? Because when fans get rabid for more detail, more video, more discussion and more information they will keep Googling and Googling and Googling until they find the right site. They will scan hundreds of Youtube videos to find that one scene, that one bit of dialogue they’ve missed.

ABC even has promoted a webisode of Kevin McKidd playing guitar at Joe’s, the bar where the Seattle Grace hospital hangs out. Fans comment back and forth, and comments and emails between fans on Youtube  fly at light speed. Any new website and material will get look-see visits from fans from the Youtube community alone. The shout out of a website can last for years when people catch up to the shows.

There are literally hundreds of videos made by fans about this couple and their romance on Grey’s Anatomy. Those are visitors and fans who could be flocking to your website. Now substitute in your favorite movie or TV show, and get going building a blog or forum introducing new or updated material. Use episode numbers in the Youtube algebra like 5X 3 meaning Season three episode 3.  or the “damsel in distress” title.

Keywords include typical phrases from the show like “dark & twisty” and the names of the characters and quotes from favorite scenes. These search terms and keywords are the shorthand that fans speak and use to find new sites. Building a site with all the easily researchable information found on these sites. The music of key episodes and overlying lyrics during key scenes are also related content in high demand.

Making the image filenames search terms, using links to videos and fan sites, and updating the site will feel like fun, not work. And if you can get a great domain name that is now copyrighted you can keep clear of the trademark material mess by not vending illegally obtained video files and citing non-ownership of the trademark names and characters.

This actively searched material will find referrals in the fan community if it’s worth a darn. And then your stats will bloom, like the flower of young doctors in love.

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