One of the most important things I’ve learned in the last two months in the “domaining world” is that my efforts are much better spent learning SEO and user habits , than picking perfect names. My
latest self teaching is link building. Rather than pay someone to randomly and blindly throw links up all over the internet, I and
a few others spend a little time each night finding sites and blogs that fit the interest of our websites. We often comment or answer questions that our websites can either help with or provide more information. We try and avoid just saying something like “nice post, that was helpful” and then a link. We will occasionally try and trade links. There are two reason the links are helpful. One, the obvious, Google likes links. Two, people see that our links are domains with the keyword of the topic being discussed. I’ll use coneflowers as I usually do. I’ll go to a gardening site discussing coneflowers and write “that is a pretty one, here one I took in my garden this year” with a link that says coneflower dot com. Because its a oneword domain and very specific, they seem to feel it must be a nice site. It’s a poor layout (another post), but it does have a lot of good photos and info. Once there, they always stay.
The solid no tail keywords seem to be much more clicked than the long tail keywords. I’m experimenting with taking one of my strong garden names and making it a url shortener so that the longer names come across as a nice gardening name, no matter what the site. The links are driving great traffic two ways. First the traffic following the links. Once there, they often create more links. Eventually, the Google juice takes over and it starts driving traffic.
Another example, we had a new “trendy” site we started up. A site that we threw up in a few hours and used the last two nights adding a few pages of content as new news came out. The pictures we put up drew the most traffic and then we were fortunate that the other two top sites drawing traffic were blogs and we could offer good comments and links. We did have something funny to add so I don’t think it was that spammy and we sent back links to the two sites. Our little quick site generated $3 the first day and has generated $6 the last 4. I know $27 is not a lot of money but I figure if I can get a few hundred dollars out of it, it will be a success. The links seem to be the biggest help.