excerpt taken from Can You Buy Your Way To The Top Of Organic Search Results? on Forbes.com
5 Key Takeaways to Improve Your Own Search Rankings
If you’re considering purchasing a domain name to drive more traffic to your website, there is important research that needs to be done to ensure you’ll get the full SEO bang for your buck — especially considering what domains like these can cost.
- Research the PR Rank of the domain you’re considering buying. The higher, the better.
- Check current key phrase rankings. Check to see where a page is ranked for your targeted key phrases on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Number one ranking isn’t always required, especially for key phrases that are highly searched. For example, being number nine on a search term that generates 100,000 queries a month may be just as valuable as being number one for a term generating only 1,000 per month.
- Choose your URL carefully. Based on the results above, the URL naming scheme you use seems to play a valuable role in determining your key phrase ranking strategy.
- Check the existing backlinks to the acquired domain name. With recent changes to Google’s algorithms, quality backlinks are more important than quantity. You may need to check the PR rankings of the pages linking back to the domain to get a true feel for the quality of the domain, but keep in mind that relevance is also a big factor.
- Target companies that are going out of business or appear with the lights on, but nobody home. Businesses fail all the time or owners want to sell and move on to other things. A lot of times the website is the last part of a business to be shut down. It’s these opportunities where you’ll have a better
chance at acquiring a well-ranked domain at an affordable price.
Good luck, and happy domain hunting!
Mark Cenicola is the President and CEO of BannerView.com and the author of “The Banner Brand: Small Business Success Comes from a BannerBrand, Build it on a Budget.”
