Obviously your course of action will depend on your current circumstance with the first two options possible only for those that are already currently operating websites RELATED to the old content of the expired domain you’ve just purchased. The fact that the content should be related is important because if it isn’t there isn’t much sense because you want to be able to inherit some of the value from the newly bought domain by doing cross-linking. Note though that if you bought the expired domain in hopes of passing on the link credit to an existing domain this will only happen if you do nothing with the site and leave it alone (except maybe for slight changes). It is still uncertain whether any link credit will be passed when you do a 301 redirect but as Danny Sullivan reported, it probably wouldn’t.

Note too that with the third option even if you won’t be linking to an existing domain it is important that the old content of the domain you’ve purchased be related to the new content you will be replacing it with simply because you want to benefit from the domain purchase.

Domain names follow a hierarchy beginning with the topmost level that consists of the generic and the country code top-level domains. These are reserved for the use of the government of a particular country and cannot come for use by the common people. The next level comprises of all the common domain names that people can use to host their website or connect to the internet. Use of correct domain names for your website is very vital for search engine optimization. In case you use a general domain name such as .com then you have few chances to top any search engines ranking whereas if you use area specific domain names then the results are impressive. You can optimize your site for a particular search engine by these small ways.

The introduction of domain names defined the various authorities or control in the internet. Another use of them is to introduce the concept of easily memorable names for internet addresses in place of just mere IP addresses so that everybody can remember them with ease.

sear.ch
b.uy
tel.ly
beach.es
justcurio.us
designm.ag
podca.st
foot.ie

Why not challenge yourself to see if you can come up with a suitable domain name?

Another way by which you can come up with a creative domain name is using a slogan. Some experts do not suggest using this method unless your slogan is already well known. Think Adidas – impossibleisnothing.com. Then there is justdoit.com for Nike. Obviously, this method works perfectly if your slogan is catchy.

Now how about making up your own word? This is where creativity really comes into play. Anyone can make up a word or a phrase. Making that word or phrase stick in the minds of people is another thing. It works, though. Think Flickr and Digg. Even if these words do not mean anything, the sites have become as big as can be.

The bottom line is this: creativity is very powerful in coming up with domain names that people will remember. That is only one part, though. Even if you have the most creative domain name in the world, it will not mean anything if you do not have great content to offer and if you do not practice other SEO techniques. Still, with a great domain name, you are one step ahead!

What exactly do I mean by brandable? (I don’t think you will find that word in the dictionary, by the way). I think Darren Rowse says it best:

Brandable Domains – these domains might often have some relation to their topic in terms of their feel or sound but are much more about creating something memorable that can become an identity in and of itself. In terms of traffic strategy – these blogs would be suited ideally to developing a blog that is aiming to build a community of loyal readers. Of course these blogs can also do very well in search engines but this is usually for other reasons (keywords in URLs are just one of many factors). Blogs that have these types of domains include Boing Boing, Gizmodo and Dooce. In fact if you look at Technorati’s Top 100 blogs – you’ll see that most of them have brandable names and not Keyword based ones.

This brings to mind some very interesting domain names that have become etched in many an Internet user’s mind. Think del.icio.us. Think other blogs that have made use of various extensions to create a memorable domain name. Let’s take a look at more of these next time.

One of the main considerations when it comes to domain names is the keyword content. The rationale is that you have to have words in your domain name that would give search engines and users an idea of what your blog is all about. If, for example, a person does a search on Google using that keyword, then your chances of being up in the SERPs are higher. More so, if they stumble upon your blog URL, they already have a clear idea of what you are offering them.

Of course, you cannot merely guess what keywords are best to use. There are many tools online which can help you find keywords that are used a lot. Wordtracker is one. Webconfs also has a keyword-rich domain suggestion tool. Just take a look around and see which keywords related to your blog are sought after and try to incorporate them in your domain name.

There are many different blog platforms today and many of them are free. I do not see any “bad” thing about using a free blogging platform, really. However, serious bloggers would tell you that it is much better if you use your own domain. This is compared to the URL that you get from a free blogging platform. If you use WordPress, you will get a URL with WordPress in it. If you use Blogger, you will get a URL with Blogspot in it. And so on.

But is that enough reason to get your own domain? I think so. It sounds and looks more professional and “real” if you have your own domain. More so, for SEO purposes, having your own domain gives you an edge.

So what should you consider when choosing a domain for your blog? If SEO is important for you and you want people to discover your blog, then you should make sure that your domain name is keyword rich. This does not mean that your URL should be long – just choose the right words to put in there in relation to your blog and its contents. Let’s take a look at this in more detail in the future.

The current main search engine (Google) doesn’t recognize the individual words from the above non-hyphenated domain names, so they would not help future optimization plans. The hyphenated domain http://www.blog-news.com is seen by Google as- www blog news com since Google treats . (dots) and – (hyphens) as a space. We say “google can parse those keywords out of the domain name”.

Note a domain with a single keyword (i.e www.keyword.tld) will have the single keyword recognized since Google sees the two dots (in the example above) as spaces. So when choosing a domain name either go with a single keyword domain or have multiple (or at least one) keyword(s) separated by hyphens.

As mentioned in the last post the SEOmoz Page Strength is a very wholistic way of determining your blog’s ability to attract traffic. This is because it takes several very important factors into consideration. As a matter of fact it actually takes into factor the top determinants of a blog’s traffic. So just what are the factors that contributes to your page strength?

The factors are:

1. The number of links pointing to your full URL.
2. The number of links pointing to your domain.
3. Your position at Google for the first four words of title tag on target URL.
4. The age of your domain. Older is better of course.
5. The number of links from domains with .edu TLDs.
6. The number of links from domains with .gov TLDs.
7. Your Alexa rank.
8. Your domain name visibility.
9. Your internal link percentage.
10. The number of your links according to Technorati.
11. The number of search results for URL search at del.icio.us.
12. Number of listings in DMOZ.
13. The number of links found in Wikipedia.
14. The Google page rank of your full URL and Domain.

We bought a domain mid June 2006, it was originally registered October 2002, it was not indexed in Google (was redirected to another site) and so had no links to it. It had been indexed in the past (years ago), but the domain was reported as PR0 home page after the redirect was lifted. Basically this site was equivalent to a newly registered domain in all aspects except it’s original registration date.

We added a large site to this domain and enough links to make a few PR4 pages at the next PR update. As I write this we’ve owned the site for just over two months and it’s traffic is similar to what we see with a newly registered domain (low traffic).

Another site we bought mid June 2006, it was originally registered August 2004, it had a few pages indexed in Google and so had a few links to it (not enough to rank well though). The home page was PR2.

We added a large site to this domain and added enough links to make one PR5 page and a few PR4 pages at the next PR update. As I write this we’ve owned the site for just over two months and it’s traffic is similar to what we see with a newly registered domain (low traffic) though slightly higher than the first site above (not enough to warrant excitement though).

Another site we bought mid June 2006, it was originally registered October 2003, it had a few pages indexed in Google and so had a few links to it (not enough to rank well though). The home page was PR4.

As I write this we’ve owned the site for just over two months and it’s traffic is significantly higher to what we see with a newly registered domain. If this was a domain we registered for the first time in June this year we wouldn’t expect to see this traffic for another 4 or more months. We wouldn’t consider this site fully out of the sandbox, but it’s on it’s way.

None of the sites above have any really difficult SERPs, the ones with more traffic have more SERPs than the others.