SEO TOOLS

In my last article I mentioned that you have the option to purchase a new domain or to purchase a “second hand” domain name. I also mentioned that you need to be very careful when you are buying a “second hand” domain names.

Allow me to give you some useful tips how to protect yourself from buying the right domain for your website. I will show you how to stay away from those domains that are banned by search engines.

Before we will get into that, let me explain why you should consider purchasing a second hand domain in the free market. In this article I will only deal with the SEO aspects.

Back in the old days webmasters learned to use the power of search engines and the power of been ranked high at their SERP. Webmasters use to trick the search engines and launched many websites that were optimized for a specific keywords. Sometimes those websites has nothing to offer other then commercial ads. It didn’t take long till Google and the other search engines developed a mechanism to fight those search engines spammers. Google developed what so called “Google SandBox”. New registered domain got into the SandBox. For popular keywords a new domain will not be listed in SERP for some period of time. Usually that period of time can be between 6 to 9 months and sometime more then a year. Google developed this mechanism in order to examine the quality of websites and their content before they gain a traffic from their SERP. At the beginning the SandBox effect was just a rumor that Google did not officially approve. Although it took time, but eventually Google gave the SandBox effect an official conformation.

As a webmaster you want your website to be listed at SERP as soon as possible. You have to choose whether to be patient with the SandBox effect or to purchase a “mature” domain name. To find our about the age of a domain you can use one of the “whois” command that many online dns info websites offers. One of the websites that I use is DNSStuff website.

If you made a decision to purchase a second hand domain, I would recommend to buy a domain that was purchased at least 18 month before.

One of the things that you will find very difficult is to find out when a domain was first introduced to search engines. You will need to do a good research after this data. You can find yourself buying a domain that was registered 2 years ago but was listed by other websites only few months ago.

The most important thing that you need to be aware of is whether the domain was banned by search engines. You can’t really tell if he WAS banned, but you can check his current status. A rule of thumb: Do not buy a domain if he is not listed by all of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo & MSN. In order to check this all you have to do is to type the name of the domain in the search box. Make sure you get the domain URL itself in the SERP and not the domain name as it was mentioned by other websites.

Ok…. We came to a step where we have a good idea for a website. We checked the most popular search keywords in our niche market. We did the math and came into a conclusion that our website worth its effort. Excellent, you are truly ready for the next step.

Now it’s a good time to make some technical decisions or what I liked to call them engineering decisions.

In order to have a website it would be preferred to have your own domain. Although you can use many of the free hosting options, I wouldn’t choose that options. The main reason is simple: if you are going to put some effort to build your websites reputation, better to own it. For example: You can easily open a blog at Blogger.com but all the SEO work that you will do, eventually will credit Blogger.com.

It doesn’t cost big bucks to have your own website. You can use a service like GoDaddy to purchase your brand new domain, or you can look for an old domain that someone is offering to sell. In most cases to purchase a “second hand” domain is preferred. That way you will be avoiding from the Google sand box effect that I will talk about later on. However, please note that there is also a big risk to purchase a “second hand” domain if you don’t know how to check his history. Its might be a banned domain name by some search engines.

Now you will need to host your website. It will always be preferred to host your website on a dedicated server. It cost much then a shared hosting server but it guarantee that your websites IP address will not be shared by any other website. It’s not a crucial parameter but as many of the other SEO parameters that count, you will have to choose between the alternatives.

I have to warn you… the SEO marathon is full of decision that you need to take. It’s not an exact science. Some will support an argument that the others will oppose to.

Depends on your website nature you can use some of the popular open source system available today. If you considering opening a blog, I highly recommend to use wordpress open source blog platform. It takes less then thirty minutes to set it up. If you don’t sure you can install it yourself, asks someone else to do it for you. He shouldn’t charge you for more then few hundreds dollars for this task. If you need a more flexible context management system try Joomla. A good e-commerce system will be OSCommerce or ZenCart. They are all open source platforms but for the last that I mentioned you will need some professional help to set it up. You can always experience that fun of writing html code. The big advantage of doing so is to have a full control about the source outcome. It’s nice thing to do if you are planning 7-8 static pages on your website, but not if you need to be able to add pages dynamically.

One of the things that I was asked so many times is whether to have a one static page website or to have a multi pages website. I can tell you that form my experience some one page websites generate income much more then a multi pages websites. Forget about search engines when you ask this question. Think about your visitors. In most cases you will find that what you find most suitable to your visitors, the search engines suitable as well. Keep in mind that ALL the search engines try to track after how the human mind is searching for information and not the opposite opposed to some will think

Yesterday I’ve got lots of emails from readers of my website who were amazed how fast this website was indexed by Google.

Allow me to say: Don’t be !

The trick is very simple. As I explained in a previous article, all you need to do is to be mentioned on some relevant websites. This is exactly what I did. I signed up in some SEO forum and introduced myself and my new project. I also asked from some webmasters (SEO related websites) to link back to my website. Some of them say no, some were very happy to participate in my realty show. I know its sound simple, but it really is. BTW you all welcome to link back to my website

Don’t get me wrong. To get a high ranking I will have to do much better then that. Keep tracking about my actions with this website.

As expected, it took only few days and SEO Tools website now can be found at Google search engine.

In the previous article I explained how to get a good estimation about the effort that you will need to take in order to get a high ranking for your website. Using this method you can even find a phrase of keywords, which if you are lucky can take only few days to make it listed at the top of the first search engine results page (SERP). However, you need more information in order to make a decision whether or not to spend time and money for SEO (Assuming that we would like to gain a profit from our website).

The second part of the equation is to try to figure out what will be the income from our website. In most cases the answer is not that simple. It depends on variety of elements: Are going to sell a product online or gain profits from advertisements. What you are going to sell? What its niche market? What its margin? How hard it will be to sell it online and etc. I am not going to learn you about your business and about the nature of its clients. However, I will do talk about traffic. How you will convert your traffic to money it’s another story. The scope of this blog is simple: to show you how to derive traffic from search engine organically.

So… we have an idea for a website and we might found some good phrases that can be ranked high hopefully with fast and easy. At this point we will need to check how often this phrase is been used by the internet community. If no one on the internet is doing a search using this phrase, there is no use to spend time on it. It’s much like to have a great show with no fans in the stadium.

In order to find this important variable of this SEO equation, you have several resources to use. Some of them are free and some of them will cost you some money. Later on I will talk in detail about the paid services. For now I will mention only on of the free services that you can have an easy access to. Some of you will be surprised, but Google, as the number one search engine, offer you a free tool that you can use in order to check the popularity of any keywords. Though you will need to sign up to the Google AdWords service, you don’t have to actually use the service in order to benefit from their keywords tool. Let’s see what we get for the phrase SEO Tools

As we can see, there are lots of advertisers for this keywords and the search volume for this phrase is average. What average means…. It’s hard to tell using this tool. However, it gives you a good perspective for a given keywords. My experienced has showed that the more tools you are using the clearer picture you have. However using all the tools that out there is impossible: They all together will cost you lots of money and you will probably not have the time to run them all.

In the next article I will start to expose some of the practical techniques that I adapted to myself. I will also review some of the SEO Tools that I tested so far and the one I keep using. And more important I will keep report about this website SEO progress.