Registering a Domain

If you want to register a domain, Do Not Search for Domains at Registrars. It has been well documented that domain registrars log the searches on their site, then sell this information to domain kiters. (A domain kiter is someone who buys a domain to see if it is profitable, if it is not, they return it for free.) If you searched for a domain, did not buy it, then came back a few days later, the domain was probably taken. You could usually wait a few days, and the domain would become available again, but this wasn’t always the case. And if you emailed the owner about the domain, they would never let it go.

So where do you search for domain names to register. Here are three places I like to go:

• Who.Is
• DomainTools
• Internic

I prefer to use DomainTools as they give you a lot of information about the domain. if the domain is registered, they give you even more information about where it is hosted, who owns it, and other details that you may want to know. They also give you a quick list of the other extensions that are available, in case you want the .net instead of the .com.

Searching for Domains

If you want to buy a domain off someone (and a not from a registrar), there are plenty of places to look. If you want a specific domain, you will probably want to email the owner directly. I will discuss tips on how to do this in a later article, but if someone owns a domain, and you actively seek them out, you are going to be paying a pretty penny for that domain. If you are just in a shopping mood, you can go to forums to search for domains. Places like DigitalPoint, NamePros, and SitePoint are great (and free) forums to shop for domains.

Building a Website

Any domain will do here. Domains ultimately don’t matter when comes to building a website. Again, look at Google and Yahoo. Maybe a better example is Squidoo. Before the website was built on Squidoo, the domain had no meaning and was probably not even worth the reg fee. But after the website has built, and the brand was established, the domain and the website become very valuable.

Now, this doesn’t mean some domain types don’t have an advantage here. Keyword Domains and Established Domains will give your website a boost before it is even created. If you buy a keyword domain and make the website about the keyword, then you will rank better in search engines. Same with Established Domains. The Age and Backlinks will help you rank better in search engines.

Selling the Domain

If you want to sell the domain, there are a few options. Established Domains are valuable because of the Age, PR, and backlinks. The older the domain, the higher the pagerank, and the more the (relevant) backlinks the higher the amount of money you will get when you sell it. Keyword Domains are valuable because they can rank well for that keyword. The more searches per month the keyword receives, the more the domain is worth. Brandable domains are only valuable when they are short. 4 letters or less are very valuable, especially .coms. 5 letter domains are becoming valuable as more and more of them are taken.

Parking the Domain

The very best domains to park are ones that receive traffic, obviously. You can try pushing traffic to a domain, but finding a domain that already has traffic will be your best bet. Some established domains already have traffic, which makes them perfect fits for parking. Finding keyword domains and brandable domains with traffic will be hard, but building traffic on them just to park is a waste. Just build a website and keep all the money for yourself.

The third type of domain name I will call Established Domains. Established Domains are domains that have PageRank, Backlinks, and/or Age. These domains have some of the work already done for you. Instead of registering a domain and waiting a few years for it to get old, you just buy a domain that is already old. Instead of registering a domain and building backlinks, you can buy a domain that already has backlinks.

Because some of the work is done for you, these domain are valuable. Aged domains are also valuable because search engines consider older domains more trustworthy. This means these domains will have better rankings in search engines. PageRank domains are valuable because most of the time they have backlinks, but also because you can sell links on these sites for monthly income. Backlinks are valuable because they can bring traffic, and relevant backlinks can increase your rankings in search engines.

There are a few precautions when it comes to established domains. Make sure the backlinks are relevant to the website. I was looking a domain the other day that had over 2000 backlinks. The domain name had the word affiliate in it, but all the links came from shopping sites. These shopping sites had nothing to do with the domain name, so the backlinks were basically worthless, along with the domain. Another thing you have to look for is that the domain is not blacklisted by Google. If the site is not indexed in Google, it could be because the old owner was doing something illegal with it.

Brandable Domains are the second type of domain name. Brandable domains are domains that mean nothing at first glance, but after the company puts the marketing behind it, it becomes a household name. Yes, that would be the ideal outcome, but most people don’t have marketing teams. Examples of Brandable Domains are Google, Yahoo, and Digg. The word Google had nothing to do with search engines before the company made it the number one search engine in the world. Yahoo was just some random slang before the company made it into the extremely popular site.

Some other examples of Brandable Domains are very short domains. 2, 3, and 4 Letter domains are very brandable, you just need to be creative. Xfep.com as turned into eXtra for Every Publisher. You may not think of it at first, but extensions other than .com are considered brandable. Tell someone to go to “Choose A Domain”, and they will head to ChooseADomain.com. I will need to brand my extension when I talk about my site and tell everyone “Choose A Domain .Net”. ProBlogger.Net was not created overnight, but when his reputation grew, people instantly thought ProBlogger = ProBlogger.net.

With the availability of short domains in little supply (there are no available 4 letter or less .coms), the value of these are rising quickly. These short domains are the only ones that are really valuable. If you would have bought Google.com before Google actually did, the domain would have been worthless. Google might have bought it from you, but you would have had no leverage, and you would have not made a lot of money.

For this reason, brandable domains are good only for creating websites. Unless you buy a short domain, you will not be able to make much money trying to resell it. I personally don’t mess with short domains, but I have sold a few for a decent profit. But with the market disappearing more and more everyday, I would stick with just buying these to build a website, an image, on them.

Keyword Domains are the first type of domain that I will discuss. Keyword Domains are domains where the name is a keyword that people type into search engines. People search for “Dog Training” on search engines, so an example keyword domain would be dogtraining.com or dogtraining.net.

Let’s continue using DogTraining.com as an example. Google’s Keyword Tool says that “Dog Training” gets over 1 million searches a month. Now this example is a little extreme, and if you look you will see that none of the major extensions for DogTraining is available. While you may think all of the popular keyword domains are taken, they are not. You can still find some very good keyword domains out there, but you have to look for them. I have recently found some great keyword domains, like this one. “Choose A Domain” gets about 900 searches a month. This may not seem like much, but coupled with the fact that the domain was perfect for the content I am writing, and I have an excellent domain name.

I will go into finding keyword domains in a later post, but what you are looking for are keywords that get a lot of searches in search engines. The more searches these keywords get, the more valuable they are. The reason for this is that search engines give a higher ranking to keyword domains. KeywordDomain.com will rank high in search engines for the search “Keyword Domain”. If you think about it, most of the time, KeywordDomain.com should be about keyword domains, so they would add value to a person looking for keyword domains.

As you can see from previous examples, keyword domains are extension independent. This means, when it comes to keyword domains, dogtraining.com and dogtraining.net have the same value. Now, the .com obviously has more value overall, but speaking strictly about keyword domains, the domain extension does not matter. So don’t be discourgaed if you cannot find every name in .com. I currently have a few .nets, and even a few .infos, and they do just as well or even better than my .com domains.

I have been in the domain industry for over 2 years now. I know that does not seem like a long time, but I have bought and sold over 200 domain names in that time. I have also run the gauntlet of domain name buying, meaning that I have registered brand new domains to buying high price domains with age, PR, and backlinks. I am not the kind of person to hold onto a domain, so if I do not have plans to create a site on the domain, I put it up for sale. I buy most of my domains with the intent of building a website, but a lot of times, my plans fall through, so I sell the domain. Other times, I buy domains because I know I can sell them for a profit.

I have personally made all the common mistakes when it comes to buying and selling domains, but thankfully, I have learned from all my mistakes. I have seen a lot of people asking the same basic domain questions in forums and on websites, and since I know the answers, or know where to look to find the answers, I decided to put up a site to give everyone some domain name help.

I will get into the guts in the future posts. Look for an explanation of domain extensions or TLDs, the three different types of domains, how to find keywords for your keyword domains, and where to buy domains.