Benefits of buying an expired domain

Everywhere we look we see people looking to find new ways of making there website even better by attracting more visitors and getting thousands of backlinks. Most people are familiar with the different methods of gaining links and increasing traffic but not many people know about the benefits of buying an expired domain.

There are many benefits of buying an expired domain, I will try and explain each one in detail. First we will look at where you can buy expired domains for and reasonable prices and what to look for so you don’t buy a dud domain.

I have visited and used two different sites that offer expired domains, the first one was registercompass.com which was ok but not great. Registercompass was pretty easy and straight forward to use offering you stats on pagerank, traffic and links, the downside was that a lot of the domains it displayed where out of date and already registered by a new owners. The second site is a more known and trusted site due to its reputation it has built over the years, the website is called godaddy.com and have information on thousands of expiring domains, the downside to godaddy is I believe they only show domains registered with them and not from other registrars.

When buying a domain you need to do some research first as you don’t want to buy a domain that has had a bad reputation in the past or has been banned/penalised by google. What you want to do is type the domain into google and see if it appears in the search results, this will give you a good indication whether or not it has been banned. You also want to check the archives for the domain you want to buy so you can see what type of site it was in its previous life. Also check the inbound links to that domain name to see what websites are linking to it and if they have anything remotely to do with your content, you don’t want to buy a domain name with hundreds of links about dogs when you sell books as that will only hurt your site.

Now that we have covered the basics I’ll explain what the benefits are from buying a good expired domain, I also believe that every website should have at least one expired domain pointing to it.

Buying an expired domain name in your niche can greatly increase the amount of traffic to your main website, what you want to do with the expired domain name is permanently point it to you main site with a 301 redirect from your domain registrar. Another great benefit of buying a good quality domain is the links that point to that domain will be transferred to your main domain site so it is important that you buy domain that relate to your site. The more inbound links the higher your pagerank will go and you will receive more traffic, I have seen many expired domains go that receive anywhere over 80,000 unique visitors a month.

Some times a website owner forgets to renew there domain for many reasons the most popular reason being they have to many domains to manage and one slips through there hands. Another reason why they will let their domain expire is their site has been penalised or banned so it’s very important to do research on every expired domain that you buy.

If you haven’t bought an expired domain for your website yet then I strongly suggest you do so as it can greatly increase sales and the potential of your business. It can take several weeks to several months before you notice the links and pagerank transferred to your site but you should notice the traffic increase pretty much instantly. Written By Michael David Tedder

Do you think you have a good Domain name in mind for your site?

WAIT!
Before you rush out register it there are a several things you need to consider.

• Are people searching for what your promoting or selling?
• What other words describe your site?
• How competitive is your market?
• Does the domain name describe your sites contents?
• Is the URL descriptive & easy to remember?

Existing Businesses

If you have an existing business you already have brand name recognition so its important to include your business name.

i.e. www.shopname.com

If that domain is taken then consider how people will search for your site. Most people will google something like (shop name) + (city) so  why not name it www.shopnamecity.com or www.shopname-city.com these domain names will almost certainly be available.

You may find that .net .us .org domain extensions are available beware of these extensions as people type .com automatically. You may wish to purchase these domains & forward to your main site.

Online Businesses

Very Important – Do people want what your selling?

Before you rush ahead & spend hours developing a site with no value think of 6 or more words that best describe your idea.

Go to Wordtracker (Its Free) & see how many people are searching those exact words. List your keywords by search volume.

Now you now know 2 things;

1. Is this an idea worth pursuing?
2. What words generated the most searches.

Obviously if  very few people are searching for your main keywords then this idea is not worth pursuing as an e-commerce business. Save your money & register for a free blog at www.blogger.com if you are really dedicated to the idea.

Do your keywords have alot of searches if so you are ready for the next step.

Don’t worry about competition at this stage I will cover search engine optimization in competitive markets later, it is more important that there are allot of searches.

Armed with your keywords you are now ready to find the perfect domain name for your new business.

Write down some options using the most popular keyword or a mixture of your keywords. It helps if your domain name is descriptive of the sites content.

A person searching the internet for  E-Commerce will click www.E-CommerceNewbie.com before  www.mywebsite.com

TIP – Hyphens as in E-Commerce are not generally a good idea however using Wordtracker you will find that more people search for E-Commerce than eCommerce.

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