Guide to making a buck in the world of domain names (Part 2)
August 11, 2009
2. SEO Your Domain for Maximum Profit.
Now that you’ve gotten yourself a domain name, it’s important to work on building value for it. If you purchased a domain name that was previously owned by someone else, it’s likely that they have already done this for you to some extent. It doesn’t hurt to promote your domain a little bit more if you’re looking to sell it, though.
It’s important to build value on the domain you own by applying simple SEO techniques to your site. These simple techniques will increase the amount of links to your site from other sites, and also help you pump content through your domain. With more backlinks and content, your ranking in search engines improves exponentially. It’s not necessary to completely develop a domain name before trying these SEO techniques, but if you want to make serious cash you can easily develop it, SEO it, then show potential buyers how well ranked your domain is. It’s very important to build site value if you want large profit margins out of your collection of domains. I’m not an SEO expert, but here are some of the things I do to try and build worth on my domain names.
The first thing I do if I have a domain that I am looking to sell is add content to the site. Search engines love content. When a search engine crawls your site and sees lots of great content, it’s more likely to give you a better ranking. The better your ranking, the easier it is to sell your domains. Some simple content ideas are:
1. Build a list on your domain. Lists are easy and fun to create, and add lots of content to your site. (Right now, you’re reading a short list!)
2. Start a blog. Blogs are fun and also great for content. Blogging software makes having a blog much easier to do now than it was five years ago. Your blog doesn’t even have to be on the site, you could create an off site blog and then link to your page. This is an easy link for yourself.
3. Sit down, and start thinking. Some of the best content comes from a mind under pressure. Although, if you’re in a quiet room there probably isn’t much pressure to write content. Anyways, the silent sitting should help you pull ideas out of the air.
Once you’ve created content and posted it to the site, you need to work on getting links. Internal links help search engines find important pages that are in your site, and also improve page rank. You can help the search engines further by making a sitemap. After you’ve fixed the internal links, work on getting external links from other websites. Search engines see external links as votes for your domain name. When a person does a quick search on a search engine, how many votes does your domain name have? Trade links with other webmasters or submit your domain to link directories to increase the amount of votes for your site. After you accrue a wealth of backlinks, you’ll notice that the domain you are selling starts ranking higher in the search engine pages. This is great for you, because it means more profit. When you start to sell domain names that you currently own, the first thing potential buyers do is search up the external links linking to your domain name. If your site shows a lot of backlinks, then the domain that used to be worth $10 is now worth a lot more than it was before you did the SEO stuff. A domain that ranks high in search engines is more likely to make money. If you do these simple things, and your rank is higher, potential buyers will notice.
These tips are quick to follow, but ultimately will take a lot of time to figure out and complete. When you go to sell your domain names, however, the end result is a large profit margin – and that’s worth the massive amount of work you put into the domain.
Check back soon for part 3.
